A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has fooled face recognition algorithms using the oldest trick in the book: a pair of fake glasses.
A white male researcher wearing the glasses was able to pass for American actress Milla Jovovich while a South-Asian female colleague was digitally disguised as a Middle-Eastern male. Both tricked commercially available face recognition software Face++ with a success rate of around 90 per cent. The system wasn’t perfect, however: a Middle-Eastern male trying to use the glasses to pass as white British actor Clive Owen only succeeded 16 per cent of the time.
The patterned glasses work by exploiting the neural networks used in face recognition systems. Neural networks don’t rely on the same features that humans do to recognise faces. The systems often focus on things like the colour of different pixels and slowly piece together a best guess of who’s in the shot by comparing it to other, similar images. If just a small area of the face has been changed, it can completely mess with the attempted recognition – which is why the computer system can confuse two people who in fact look very different.
They designed bespoke glasses with a pattern that changes how the system interprets the wearer’s face. The frames essentially overlay the face with pixels that perturb the software’s calculations in just the right way that it misidentifies the person as another specified face in its database – Milla Jovovich, for example. To a human, the frames just look like a colourful tortoiseshell design.
