5

Is there a way to alter solo or group portraits to make faces recognizable to or identifiable by humans (their friends), but not by facial recognition software (by Facebook, etc.)?

William C
  • 2,439
  • 5
  • 27
  • 44
  • 3
    In short, no. In fact it's probably easier to make them unrecognizable to humans. At most you can frustrate some specific classes of recognition software, but if humans can recognize so can software. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 10 '13 at 02:40
  • What type of software are we talking here? – Austin T French Sep 10 '13 at 02:58
  • @AthomSfere: Facial Recognition software, of course. That's a very specific task, general purpose software won't work. – MSalters Sep 10 '13 at 08:29
  • @DanielRHicks Sure it's possible to make software to recognize faces better than humans can, but current software may use specific features (e.g. nose, ears, cheeks) which we can modify or paint over to make fun profile pictures while thwarting facial recognition software. Once everyone does this the software update is easy enough to apply, but until then it works. – Luc Oct 01 '14 at 16:54

3 Answers3

7

Facial recognition software most commonly uses proportional distances to do recognition. For example the distance between the eyes, the width of the mouth proportional to the face, the length of the nose and ears proportional to the face, etc.

By masking or distorting the proportions, you can defeat photo recognition software. Wearing a hat low, large sunglasses, wearing ear muffs, etc, can break the algorithms. You could distort all the faces in your pictures by "pinching" or other filters... the pictures just wont look good.

Keltari
  • 71,875
  • 26
  • 179
  • 229
1

The short answer is No. AS the others have noted, FR software takes in the measurements of the face and extrapolates from that who it is. It is not 100% accurate as you already know. Without adding or removing elements from the picture, in other words changing the image drastically, FR software will pick it up. You can digitally add glasses, or a hat etc but this changes the image so it's no longer the correct image.

Sean O'Donoghue
  • 11
  • 1
0

Yes to some extent, by the highly irregular makeup and feature obscuring method with random patterns (patterened after WWII Dazzle ship camouflage), you can fool some systems by breaking the pattern box they use to recognize a face.

Look up the work of Adam Harvey and CV Dazzle. Will not necessarily work with all software and you have to like the "Clockwork Orange" look.

Fiasco Labs
  • 6,756
  • 1
  • 26
  • 33