Face masks are breaking facial recognition algorithms, says new government study

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/28/21344751/facial-recognition-face-masks-accuracy-nist-study

by rbanffy • 6 years ago

111 108 6 years ago

madalinab• 6 years ago

There is a bigger impact on the biometrics industry. Face recognition (because of the masks) is the most obvious one, but there are also fingerprint scanning and voice recognition which took a hit. As a viable alternative, typing biometrics could be the safe & user-friendly way to go (recognising people by the way they type). You can see more on this topic on the TypingDNA blog: https://blog.typingdna.com/covid-19-pandemic-challenges-the-...

gver10• 6 years ago

Could you explain what's wrong with disinfecting the fingerprint scanner?

goatinaboat• 6 years ago

Fingerprint scanners are legacy tech. The cool kids now are using palm vein scanners - great CER and non-contact, you just hover your hand an inch above.

aditzup2• 6 years ago

The problem is convenience. I have to press the elevator button every day. After I disinfect my hand for the 5th time that day I use the stairs. Same with the fingerprint scanner.

asdff4• 6 years ago

I'd probably be pinned for a different person entirely if I took a typing biometric first thing in the morning and after the fifth cup of coffee

aditzup2• 6 years ago

That is not the case. I played around with this technology for a bit and it stores more than just one pattern in order to better understand how you type.

jobigoud3• 6 years ago

What about ear and retina? Are these purely sci-fi at this point?

lvturner• 6 years ago

If I recall correctly several medical conditions can be detected by retinal scans, which has historically made widespread use of the technology undesirable.

EDIT: Sorry, it seems that it's more that medical conditions make it unreliable

Certain eye-related medical conditions and diseases, such as cataracts and glaucoma, can render a person unable to use retina-scan technology, as the blood vessels can be obscured.

https://www.biometricupdate.com/201307/explainer-retinal-sca...

totetsu3• 6 years ago

https://www.anuscan.com/

totetsu3• 6 years ago

adding this api to my dns blocklist. thank you.

bfuclusion• 6 years ago

Good. Facial recognition coupled with mass CCTV is going to force us to make _hard_ choices in respect to privacy, and I don't think any society on earth is truly prepared to deal with that yet.

raxxorrax2• 6 years ago

Britain uses a lot of CCTV but I don't see them doing better on crime. Theoretically that should conclude the topic.

waihtis3• 6 years ago

Do you base this based on numbers or gut feeling? I've always felt unnaturally safe in London despite it being a massive sprawl of people-filled chaos.

weego• 6 years ago

Again, as always, what you call Britain the reality is that its centers around a small number of cities and primarily the heart of London. And again, a large percentage is privately owned and not wired into the kind of Person of Interest system that people appear to have conjured up in their minds.

Xelbair• 6 years ago

There was a good, widely quoted paper that i read back in my uni days that analyzed crime rates all over uk in context of surveillance.

It heavily depends on the location type - parking lots were way way safer with CCTV presence, but there was no effect in public pedestrian spaces.

billyruffian• 6 years ago

What do you mean by that? Prevention, detection or prosecution? Genuinely interested. For certain crimes (I'm thinking of the Salisbury poisonings for example) CCTV seems, on the face of things, pretty central to finding out what actually happend.

akerro2• 6 years ago

2 years ago facial recognition was used in Cardiff during UEFA final, the result was >2000 false positives

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/facial-recogni...

Angostura• 6 years ago

Britain uses a lot of CCTV but I don't see them doing better on crime.

I think we'd need a comparative trial to really know that.

vaxman• 6 years ago

coupled with mass 5G CCTVs

..there, fixed it for you.

With _the_federal_government_ ensuring that 5G covers every inch of the territory enabling economies of scale for low cost SOCs and pricing tiers, the days of WiFi for any kind of mass deployment (doorbells, ATMs, street cams, etc) are ordinally numbered backwards from a small integer. With all fixed location cameras connected in that way, he who controls the 5G controls the world...

MikeRJM• 6 years ago

Agreed.

There have already been a few 'iffy' situations in London where facial recognition trials have caused upsets.

Big Brother Watch has been highly vocal on the subject and worth keeping an eye out for on social media etc

codezero2• 6 years ago

It’s my understanding they don’t work against all kinds of depth scanners and that there are some researchers/agencies who are using gait tracking which is promising and doesn’t require facial recognition. I assume it might require mass surveillance and that gaits may be localized, but the general sense I have, is we shouldn’t get complacent and every time we think we are safe, we are probably not being creative enough.

asdff4• 6 years ago

Time to give each other charlie horses to limp or start awkardly stumbling around in stilletos in public.

tenuousemphasis• 6 years ago

Put a pebble in your shoe.

signa11• 6 years ago

ministry of silly walks is way better.

sukilot4• 6 years ago

Or throw yourself in front of a flying tear gas canister.

lovegoblin• 6 years ago

Walk without rhythm.

3327• 6 years ago

Remember remember the 6th of November.

k1t• 6 years ago

Why?

ambentzen• 6 years ago

It's the day after Guy Fawkes Day, duh...

Taniwha• 6 years ago

It was the day they started to torture Guy Fawkes

Meic• 6 years ago

And which particular Government department is in charge of stating the bleeding obvious today?

genericone• 6 years ago

Covid - Check

Police Surveillance - Check

Big Tech - Check

That's a damn attractive ad-article already, even without the quotes and fluff. Click-bait topic bingo.

mcintyre1994• 6 years ago

Out of interest has anyone tried setting up an alternative appearance in Apple’s Face ID with a mask on yet? I only have my normal appearance set up and a mask is enough to stop that working - which is pretty unsurprising. I didn’t realise you could have an alternative appearance set up, curious how well that’ll work - can it accurately learn and then recognise with a mask on?

the_other• 6 years ago

I use it. The system recognises me about 80% unmasked, and about 50% masked. Roughly.

blensor• 6 years ago

The question that comes to my mind is, how much worse did you make your security by enrolling with a mask. Because if it recognizes you with a mask 50% of the time, how many non-yous with a mask would it recognize as you as well?

zensavona• 6 years ago

How? My iPhone tells me to remove face covering when I try.

helsinkiandrew• 6 years ago

You mean to say that something that covers half or more of the thing being recognised makes the recognition worse? who'd have thought?

The real news is that the error rate for the top algorithms only dropped to 5%. I can't find these numbers in the original report on my phone: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2020/NIST.IR.8311.pdf

mlazos• 6 years ago

Yeah considering I can’t recognize people with a face mask on I’m not surprised.

minerjoe• 6 years ago

We are just not there yet. For all the people that I can't recognize initially, I do recognize many. And if I can do it, some supercomputer probably can in the future, and the future is coming fast.

madballster2• 6 years ago

And this is exactly why no facial recognition algorithm should be called "intelligent".

jobigoud3• 6 years ago

Can an intelligent human recognize faces without failure when the person wears a mask?

bzb3• 6 years ago

Which is a great point. It's like autonomous vehicles: it doesn't have to be perfect; being better than humans is enough.

madballster2• 6 years ago

An intelligent human knows when they see a mask. An algorithm does not know what a mask is.

distrill• 6 years ago

Part of me wants to say "duh", but studies that show obvious results are still useful.

I had a similar thought when I saw the paper last week that showed masks that don't cover the nose are less effective than those that do. On the one hand, why did we need a study to show this. On the other hand, now we have a study confirming it.

dyadic• 6 years ago

These obvious studies aren't just for the yes/no answer. It also provides other data.

Like, if I actively wanted to evade facial recognition then I now know that a black mask is better than a blue mask.

JaggerJo• 6 years ago

another reason to wear one ;)

Havoc• 6 years ago

How do the Chinese deal with this?

Presumably they’ve had this problem for a while.

scrollaway2• 6 years ago

I remember reading that the Chinese commonly used far more advanced algorithms that looked at not only face but height, posture and walk to identify even without the face, or with a partially obscured face.

sn41• 6 years ago

Fill your shoes with small pebbles. Once in a while, you'll stomp on them and wince. I guess it will change your gait.

dx0344• 6 years ago

Basically like browser fingerprinting. Use a lot of indicators that are insignificant on their own to create one powerful method of identification.

The problem with those is that it's really hard to get around them. Changing one of the factors isn't going to help. You'd have to identify the most significant ones to change those (if that's possible).

hardwaresofton• 6 years ago

I watched two DW documentaries on coronavirus in China[0][1] -- [1] is now private but you can see what the page looked like on the wayback machine[2]. What I remember from one of the videos (not sure which) was that they had facial recognition with masks working, they discussed it and there was some b-roll of facial recognition cameras set up inside a mall(?) and other places.

The other commenters who have noted that there are lots more variables involved (height, gait, etc) are also right of course.

I think China is a world leader in this field of technology, and I fully expect them to have solved this, for better or (almost certainly) for worse. Imagine if you had an organization with virtually unlimited local currency willing to pay researchers/smarter-than-average/average programmers to solve the who-is-that-in-this-picture problem, but also you had no regulation to answer to with regards to personal privacy and/or data access ("it's for national security" gets you close to no oversight in western nations, but not quite China-level). Consider the problem mostly solved. Even if it wasn't, the fact that just about every citizen carries a cell tower/GPS beacon with them should be enough to help narrow down the search space dramatically, even if your algorithm/methods were dogshit (it isn't).

China has created a real life 1984, and tech helped them get here. I don't know whose (including me) conscience that's supposed to be on but just putting it out there.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K3fy5eKeuM

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm92Rd262qQ

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

sukilot4• 6 years ago

Part of the 1984 method is that even when techniques don't work, they lie and say the techniques do work, to scare the populace. See also the polygraph machine

SXX• 6 years ago

Any information regarding that which came from China just gonna be biases. They obviously gonna try to sell their mass surveillance systems as greater good that eliminated crime completely.

In real life totalitarian country don't need ro worry about unsolved crime since there ia no one to report on it. Anyone talking about any kind of crime on social media just gonna be slienced or just censored to begin with for spreading rumors.

m0zg• 6 years ago

It's time to switch to gait recognition I suppose. Same cameras, different algorithms. Where cameras can be upgraded they can be upgraded to also capture some IR bands, in which you can see through (some) masks, clothing, and even some plastics. Algorithms could stay roughly the same in that case.

flarg• 6 years ago

My phone won't unlock when I'm out and about now

karxxm2• 6 years ago

So in the next couple of years, face recognition algorithms will be able to detect us only using the upper part of our face?

cauliflower2718• 6 years ago

Only until large sunglasses get popular.

karxxm2• 6 years ago

Then it will be features on your ears which can classify you

obilgic• 6 years ago

Why do you need facial recognition, when cameras get good enough and just scan retinas?

Markoff• 6 years ago

good, I would be curious what impact would have mask like this I ordered few days ago for fun :-)

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001276782076.html

there are even better more expensive balaclavas, but not gonna spam it here with link

me_me_me• 6 years ago

... and suddenly in US masks are a freedom right, and only a facist-communist would want to take them away from the good people.

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

It sure breaks mine. I saw my cousin in a mask in a restaurant, she recognized me and I didn't know her until she spoke.

Maybe once we don't look at a person and think "Facemask!", once it becomes normal, we'll retrain to identify folks by eyes, head shape, body language etc. And quit relying on nose and mouth so much.

Face masks are breaking facial recognition algorithms, says new government study

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