There is a weak component to facial recognition systems that can be exploited to make one invisible to facial recognition, but you stick out like a sore thumb to people. The exploit is to not have a human face, meaning the regular pattern of two eyes centered above a nose and mouth. The exploit is as simple as placing a sticker of a 3rd eye, a 2nd nose, or any other facial feature that is "not human" and you will be invisible to facial recognition. The reason this works is because the initial test for finding faces in images is a weak test, it has to be fast because it has to evaluate every possible rectangle in a video frame. That test is looking for the regular human pattern of a human face, and it that test passes that rectangle get more investigation. Failing that initial test, that rectangle is invisible...
Anyone else think of "A Scanner Darkly" movie with the interpolate mask that transitions between different faces as the means for better Adversarial Fashion?
Wouldn't one be able to use a hyper real mask to create false evident to frame someone? People are so blind in trusting AI that innocent people are being left in jail were primitive detective work would prove they were not he culprit. [0]
Face detection on the example images immediately focused on the right part and after that recognition becomes much easier when you crop out the rest. Not convinced. It’s a cool gimmick though. I like the MARPATish look of the black and white one.
The most effective socially acceptable mechanism is a burqa or COVID mask or motorcycle helmet sock.
As Phil Zimmerman might opine, it’s not so much about defying every attack, it’s moreso about making it more difficult en masse by increasing the unit cost. Though perhaps in the 90s surveillance tech wasn’t quite scaling as quickly as it is now.
I hope designs like this become easier to purchase soon. It'd be fun to experiment with cameras I've got access to and I'd totally wear it out places on the weekend.
Totally get that it's a cat-and-mouse thing, but I don't mind making more work for the people trying to force this on us all.
They've made covering your face illegal in lots of places before the pandemic made it obligatory. We had protests here where people wore masks and masks were swiftly banned. It's ok for police though.
I would expect it to be covered under any existing laws about circumventing security systems or impeding law enforcement. A more specific law would probably pass in this environment though.
It’s great how with the clothing and the cars, what makes you harder to detect with AI makes you an incredibly easy to detect, garish clown to everyone else.
I'm pretty sure adversarial fashion hoodies are something you would only wear if your aim was to stand out. Porch thieves just pull their cap low and look at the ground while nicking your package.
Simple baseball hat is one of the oldest tricks in the book and is a staple for a reason. The brim blocks your eyes and upper half of your face, facial recognition gets broken because the camera cannot find two eyes and a nose bridge, and the biggest one over these ridiculous patterns, zero suspicion. It's not weird to wear a hat, but you stand out immediately wearing any of these adversarial patterns.
Granted, a hat will not trick "person" detection, you'll still get picked up in the box, but any camera that records with motion will still detect you in the adversarial pattern too as a person, even if it doesn't pick up your face to ID you.
If I were up to anything nefarious, I'd rather blend in with other humans as much as possible, not stand out like a sore thumb.
Nah these designs can never proliferate very far because you can EASILY train AI to recognize the difference between these patterns and an actual face.
You need to make a hoodie covered with actual size faces. That will fool the AI and will be harder to account for. Use AI itself to generate these faces so every hoodie has unique faces. Then imagine everyone in a crowd wearing this.
Boom. THAT will fool AI for long time. But let's not fool ourselves... AI can eventually even be trained to recognize this. But it buys us a bit more time before the end.
Projects like this pop up multiple times per year. Mostly one off student project, sometimes famous designers. Its such low hanging fruit that wont change anything. Better start teaching politics in art school?
It will always be a cat-and-mouse game. I don't think it's possible to have any sort of visual that an algorithm can't be trained to recognize.
sidenote: did Adversarial Fashion stop selling the ALPR shirts/hoodies? That was my favorite thing to wear years back. And they're probably still effective at inserting noise.
What we need is a legislative solution to street surveillance proliferation. Germans figured that one out, rest of the world is capable of doing it too.
You need a system that does gait analysis, which requires upgrades across the board. All
those sunk costs on pervasive facial recon systems. Sucks teeth.
Wouldn't one be able to use a hyper real mask to create false evident to frame someone? People are so blind in trusting AI that innocent people are being left in jail were primitive detective work would prove they were not he culprit. [0]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/01/innocent-...
The most effective socially acceptable mechanism is a burqa or COVID mask or motorcycle helmet sock.
Totally get that it's a cat-and-mouse thing, but I don't mind making more work for the people trying to force this on us all.
Granted, a hat will not trick "person" detection, you'll still get picked up in the box, but any camera that records with motion will still detect you in the adversarial pattern too as a person, even if it doesn't pick up your face to ID you.
If I were up to anything nefarious, I'd rather blend in with other humans as much as possible, not stand out like a sore thumb.
You need to make a hoodie covered with actual size faces. That will fool the AI and will be harder to account for. Use AI itself to generate these faces so every hoodie has unique faces. Then imagine everyone in a crowd wearing this.
Boom. THAT will fool AI for long time. But let's not fool ourselves... AI can eventually even be trained to recognize this. But it buys us a bit more time before the end.
sidenote: did Adversarial Fashion stop selling the ALPR shirts/hoodies? That was my favorite thing to wear years back. And they're probably still effective at inserting noise.
What we need is a legislative solution to street surveillance proliferation. Germans figured that one out, rest of the world is capable of doing it too.