Camouflage against CCTV

Now in large cities there are practically no places left out of sight of one or several cameras - police and municipal cameras on the streets and squares, private video surveillance systems in shops and cafes, video recorders in cars, smartphones cameras, and soon Google Glass, and others. similar gadgets - often several lenses can look in our direction at the same time. Add to this the functions of face recognition in social networks and advanced video analytics systems like this - and it turns out that almost every step we take is recorded and analyzed.

Each action gives rise to opposition, and recently, one after another, projects have begun to appear whose goal is to protect themselves from the “all-seeing eye,” or at least draw public attention to the problem of total observation.

Isao Etidzen, a professor at the Tokyo National Informatics Institute, and Seiichi Goshi, a professor at the Tokyo Kogakuin University of Technology, suggest wearing glasses with infrared LEDs. Their light is invisible to the eyes, but the vast majority of cameras are quite sensitive in the near-infrared range. The included LEDs greatly complicate face recognition or even turn it into a blurry spot of light.
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The prototype, demonstrated by the Japanese, looks rather clumsy, but if you use sufficiently miniature LEDs and a battery that can be placed directly in the frame, the glasses will look no different from ordinary ones. However, someone may even like such a brutal appearance (for example, him ).



The project of the German artist and designer Martin Bakes, who works at the junction of high technology and art, is called Pixelhead . This is a balaclava with a pattern in the form of a pixelated image of a human head. The project is primarily symbolic and political, and not practical - the picture is based on a photograph of the German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Frederick, known for his paranoid attitude to the Internet and his desire to strengthen control and expand the powers of the government to monitor citizens.


Perhaps, the New York artist and hacker Adam Harvey in his project CV Dazzle approached the matter most seriously. Using the OpenCV library and Java and Processing scripts, he picked up several hairstyles and makeup options that make it very difficult for face recognition algorithms to work. He used sharp contrasting lines and spots that either cut the face into pieces, or create “false targets” for the algorithms.

The result looks extravagant, but in large cities, where new youth subcultures regularly appear and disappear, few people will be surprised by this. If wearing a mask that covers a face in public places is too obvious a desire to disguise, and in some cases even illegally , then it is almost impossible to present any claims to the owner of such makeup.

Adam Harvey borrowed the idea of ​​such a disguise from the military. A similar contrasting camouflage was used during the First World War - wide black and white stripes literally “broke” the silhouettes of the warships, preventing them from correctly determining their type, size and orientation.



Photos of models camouflaged using the CV Dazzle technique are not recognized by most popular web services that can mark faces in photos. One of the demo shows how the PhotoTagger tool could not detect a single face in the 14 portraits uploaded to Facebook.

For comparison, Adam Harvey tested several photos of people from primitive tribes in the traditional coloring, covering the face almost completely. It turned out that they are recognized much more confidently than faces with a much less colorful, but specially selected to deceive the algorithm, make-up.

In January of this year, Harvey introduced the Stealth Wear collection, which includes raincoats and capes made of a material that does not transmit thermal radiation, which make it possible to hide from the infrared drone cameras and a phone case that blocks any radiation and ensures that no one can track move the owner until he wants to call.