Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Face Scan Arrives

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#31

Post by differentView »

astrodust wrote: post #19
wes-exp wrote: post #3

As the article says, "Before the advent of these new technologies, time and effort created effective barriers to surveillance abuse. But those barriers are now being removed. They must be rebuilt in the law." Time and effort maintained privacy in the past, by default. However, as technology improves, privacy is no longer the default, so we need to request it, specifically. I hear again and again that "no one cares ab…

Guess it's time for dazzle paint to become a trendy new fashion statement. (Example: http://cvdazzle.com/ ). Someone like Lady Gaga is basically untrackable if she's wearing any of her usual ununsual outfits.

This tech will have a hard time in Korea. http://i.imgur.com/1IoM5AK.jpg

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#33

Post by therobot24 »

wicknicks wrote: post #2

Does anyone know how this can be technically achieved? Large scale face recognition with 1 photo per person in the training set?

I do it with only a single ocular image (eye, eyebrow, and surrounding skin texture) rather than the full face. Using 1:1 matching environments are common for NIST challenges.

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#34

Post by anonymousDan »

bsenftner wrote: post #22
wicknicks wrote: post #2

Does anyone know how this can be technically achieved? Large scale face recognition with 1 photo per person in the training set?

Yes, it exists, and I use it every day. In fact, I have a partnership with the DOD/NSA subcontractors who created it, and I have applied the technology to the automated creation of 3D Avatars given a single photo of a person's face. My version of the tech is available at www.3D-Avatar-Store.com. The system works as follows: a person's head is laser scanned, at the same time dozens of single photos are taken of that p…

What's the state of the art in terms of extending such systems to handle faces that are partially obscured (e.g. wearing glasses)? References to further resources in the area accepted and appreciated! I'm going to start work on a face recognition system soon and I'm keen to learn more about their current limitations.

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#35

Post by varelse »

jerf wrote: post #26
nathan_long wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the cat detector, but Picasa seems able to identify people in photos pretty well, despite varying positions and lighting conditions. It creeps me out. Granted, they are working with the much smaller set of people I know rather than the whole populace. But technology only gets better.

"But technology only gets better." Technology is bounded by mathematical constraints, though. The more you constrain the number of faces you are scanning and you are looking for, the easier the task is. But when you're trying to pick out any of perhaps thousands of persons of interest across an input set that is, say, in the millions, the more impossible it becomes. If it helps, imagine that you've equipped a person…

Just like there was a relatively cheap countermeasure to every pipe dream revision of the SDI, such countermeasures are already in place for facial recognition:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/gear-and-gadgets/glasses-foil...

But at least we'll fall victim to a higher, rarified caliber of terrorist rather than that awful riffraff we're dealing with now.

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#36

Post by [deleted] »

nathan_long wrote: post #16
varelse wrote: post #11

Given the 15.8% success rate of the cat detector on large data sets: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.6209.pdf&embedded=true , My chief worry is overconfidence from hopelessly technologically ignorant bureaucrats combined with a slew of false negatives and false positives when applied to human faces on general surveillance feeds. In contrast, driver's license, ID, and arrest photos are at least severely constrained input fi…

I don't know about the cat detector, but Picasa seems able to identify people in photos pretty well, despite varying positions and lighting conditions. It creeps me out. Granted, they are working with the much smaller set of people I know rather than the whole populace. But technology only gets better.

[deleted]

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#37

Post by anigbrowl »

unono wrote: post #6

If VR headsets like Oculus Rift take off, this problem can be mitigated. People will walk around with headsets to cover their entire face, defeating the cameras. Surveillance is going to happen, if you ban government surveillance, the public will get this tech and drones and be doing it anyway. So the robust way to fight it is to plan your life knowing that you can always be monitored and someone will always know whe…

People will walk around with headsets to cover their entire face, defeating the cameras.

Let's face it, you're won't going to walk around with a VR headset on your face unless you're a) wireless connected to a server, or b) enjoy taking a heavy backpack or cart of gear everywhere.

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#38

Post by mistercow »

Given the rate of false positives when "cold hits" are used with DNA databases, facial recognition (which is presumably higher entropy than DNA) has the potential to send a lot of innocent people to jail.

I also have some concerns of inadvertent "software racism". See for example, this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM. Obviously facial recognition isn't inherently incapable of recognizing people of different races, but if it's designed and calibrated on subjects of one race, it won't necessarily work well for subjects of different races. The last thing we want is a facial recognition database that thinks e.g. all Arabs look alike.

And of course, there are a ton of ways that it can be thwarted easily and inconspicuously, even if it works very well. Are all surveillance cameras going to be fitted with IR filters to ensure that a bright IR LED necklace doesn't blind them? And how hard is it for a criminal to hire a makeup artist?

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#39

Post by cbhl »

nathan_long wrote: post #16
varelse wrote: post #11

Given the 15.8% success rate of the cat detector on large data sets: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.6209.pdf&embedded=true , My chief worry is overconfidence from hopelessly technologically ignorant bureaucrats combined with a slew of false negatives and false positives when applied to human faces on general surveillance feeds. In contrast, driver's license, ID, and arrest photos are at least severely constrained input fi…

I don't know about the cat detector, but Picasa seems able to identify people in photos pretty well, despite varying positions and lighting conditions. It creeps me out. Granted, they are working with the much smaller set of people I know rather than the whole populace. But technology only gets better.

Identifying people's faces, especially caucasians, is relatively considered straightforward nowadays. Google spent a lot of time working on the problem so they could obscure faces in Google Street View. You start by looking for the eyes, which are dark spots surrounded by white. Then, you go from the eyes to the nose.

Identifying which person a face belongs to is a classification problem, which gets difficult the larger the set you're comparing to. Facebook has some tech that is interesting here, but it also only checks your friends and some level of false positives is acceptable. I imagine it that what algorithms they have aren't quite good enough to, say, identify your face out of an entire city's worth of driver's license photos. (Yet, which is what this article alludes to.)

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#40

Post by roc »

> "But as surveillance technology improves, the distinction between public spaces and private spaces becomes less meaningful."

Or more to the point: as the NSA mandates access to all private data, the distinction of recordings from public spaces and recordings from private spaces is made moot.

Post reply on HN