All the ways that facial recognition can be fooled — and even hacked

Identifying partially hidden faces is no big deal for today’s technologies, so wearing glasses and scarves do not really help. But there’s really not much a computer can do if you go around hiding your face completely. If one goes around wearing a full face mask or uses these 3-D printed human face mask , you can hide from the cameras. But there’s a catch, it’s illegal to go around covering your face in most countries.

^{Credits: Neutrogena}

You can trick the system by wearing something that has too many faces printed on it. The entrepreneurs of Hyperface project created clothes and accessories with too many fake faces on it. The use of numerous fake faces will make it difficult for the facial recognition system to recognise the real face.

The database can be fooled by subtly changing elements of a photo. A computer engineering student at the University of Toronto, Joey Bose, made an app that can modify certain elements of a photograph before it goes onto the Internet.

“The photos don’t look any different to the naked eye but the hidden features thwart detection systems,'' said Joey.

But there’s a catch. The technology works for only those people who haven’t uploaded their photos on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram. Many facial recognition systems use social media sites as a reliable source for database formation.

Normal glasses obviously don’t work.

A professor from Japan(Isao Echizen) invented a ‘privacy visor’ which reflected the light around the eyes when titled a little.

Reflectables, a company from Chicago also created glasses which blocks out the infrared light. But the product has not yet made it to the market.

Credits: Youtube/ikinamo

CV Dazzle is a company aiming to combine hair styles and heavy makeup to fool FR. Another style of makeup called ‘Juggalos’ using black paint on your chin which aims at fooling FR into misplacing the location of your jaw.

Even though there’s a chance that you may get around low tech FR which uses visible light, it’s no match for infrared FR which takes into consideration your entire face structure, primarily the contours, like in IPhone X. Heavy makeup hence, don’t work very well either.

Credits: Youtube/DarkArtboy

Since most facial recognition use infrared imaging to collect your facial features, it is possible to confuse it by throwing extra infrared light on the face which is invisible to the naked eye. That’s exactly what a group of researchers did in 2018. They embedded some infrared LEDs in a baseball cap which confused the computer vision and rendered the face unidentifiable in most cases.