The average resident of London comes into view of the CCTV cameras over 300 times a day – that is, in the capital of Britain, one camera for every 14 people. According to forecasts, this figure will rise to 1-for-11 in the next five years. Taking into account the trend, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of technology and IBM have developed a t-shirt which makes a person invisible to systems of recognition.

Conventional recognition algorithms work like this: the system “sees” the characteristic image, draws around him, “bounding box” and assigns this object to the appropriate ID. To interrupt the circuit, the engineers have placed on t-shirt vivid pixel designs. The pattern is designed to confuse the system of classification and labelling, based on artificial intelligence. This makes it difficult for her to identify facial features of the person.

The results of the experiments showed that wearing a shirt like that reduces the likelihood that you’ll find by using technology of digital surveillance by 63 %. Although this cyberotica still has difficulties with the implementation outside laboratories and requires improvements.

Today, to confuse the algorithms for facial recognition, people are turning to cosmetics. It takes a lot of paint and time for a Grimm, able to hide key features of the face such as the eyes or nose. In the future, in place of such time-consuming methods may come as just simple and unpretentious clothing with the effect of “digital camouflage”.


Source — Wired