Researchers defeat facial recognition video with Natural-Looking Makeup!

[thewayne]

Very interesting. Facial recognition (FR) has problems, this is well-known. There are also attacks against it. It's been demonstrated that the Dazzle camouflage used on World War I navy ships is effective because it can't lock on to measure distances between eyes, nose, nostrils, etc to compute geometry.

This attack is different. They took twenty people and blacklisted all of them in the system so they would all be flagged immediately. Then they used a smartphone app to identify "heatmaps" of their faces, and a makeup artist went to work to make up their faces to shadow their faces naturally, and achieved a 98%+ success rate at spoofing the FR system! And their faces look completely authentic and real, even a bit glamorous.

Article on Vice discussing the attack:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78v9m/researchers-defeated-advanced-facial-recognition-tech-using-makeup

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[kathmandu]

Interestingly, to a human eye the before and after images look almost exactly the same, just kind of video-game-stylized.

[silveradept]

That's delightful, especially if you can get the heatmap easily. I wonder how replicable this is for someone who doesn't have a lot of makeup training - can they successfully fool the system on their first try at applying the makeup?

[thewayne]

Fool the system AND make it look natural.