April 13, 2010: Hiding Faces

Big Brother is everywhere. :unsure:
With modern technology, he can have machines watch you with the unblinking eye, 24/7.
But unlike humans, the machine has to identify where your face is, in order to compare it to data base.

Adam Harvey's Blog shows this test of the machine's ability to find faces that are painted.

Images with a red square tested positive, a face was found
Images without a red square tested negative, no face was found
Images under the section “TEST PATTERNS” are made according to results of the Haar deconstruction
Images under “RANDOM PATTERNS” are random doodles made without the anti-face detection patterns in mind
Images underneath the “NO PATTERNS” heading are left untouched to show that the face detection works well on simple line drawings

So maybe KISS was just paranoid.;)

If I was going to get a tattoo, I think it would be a facial tattoo.

.....which is to say, I won't be getting a tattoo.

lumberjim;648181 wrote:

If I was going to get a tattoo, I think it would be a facial tattoo.

.....which is to say, I won't be getting a tattoo.

How about a facial that's not permanent? ;)

If you smear some grease paint on your face, cops are going deem you suspicious, and ask to see identification.

Also this is a technology race and would only work for a little while. If it catches on and becomes a problem, then big brother will just use laser scanning or radar or sonar or something like that to take a picture of the shape of your head.

Not if there's a big festival/party going on or you are wearing a football jersey and have something like #2 on.

glatt;648228 wrote:

If you smear some grease paint on your face, cops are going deem you suspicious, and ask to see identification.

Digital cameras can 'see' infrared light but the Gestapo agents do not. (If you look at your TV's remote controller through your camcorder, you'll see the infrared LED light up each time you push a button.)
Solution: smear random patterns on your face with an infrared paint. The recognition software won't be able to lock on to you and the cops will only see some vaseline-like smudges if they get close.
Problem: Who sells infrared paint?

Excellent point.

Why are "we' hiding from cops? :eyebrow:

Nirvana;648242 wrote:

Why are "we' hiding from cops? :eyebrow:

Why aren't we?

It is my own damn business if I would like to walk down a street in front of a bank without having Big Brother watching my every move.

I don't want, need, or should have a babysitter looking over my shoulder every time I want to leave the house.

OK, some help here. The article glibly tosses out "the Haar deconstruction."
Google turns up 178,000 hits plain and 150 or so in quotations.
All of the latter seem to refer to, guess what? This study on faces. What seems to be lacking is any discussion about WTF is "Haar deconstruction."
Anybody have a clue?

Haardy-haar.

Diaphone Jim;648290 wrote:

OK, some help here. The article glibly tosses out "the Haar deconstruction."
Google turns up 178,000 hits plain and 150 or so in quotations.
All of the latter seem to refer to, guess what? This study on faces. What seems to be lacking is any discussion about WTF is "Haar deconstruction."
Anybody have a clue?

try a Google search for "Haar face recognition" without quotes. You should have some more luck there.

If you go to the link ,and click on the Adam Harvey (AH) symbol in the upper right, it will take you to his home page. Scroll down for posts on Haar.

So, Goth chicks will be invisible to big brother?

Only if they're asymmetrical, it appears.

Looks like Gene Simmons and his gang were onto something decades before their time.

Thanks, guys. The Wikipedia pages on Haar and Daubechies wavelets are especially edifying.

newtimer;648235 wrote:

Digital cameras can 'see' infrared light but the Gestapo agents do not. (If you look at your TV's remote controller through your camcorder, you'll see the infrared LED light up each time you push a button.)
Solution: smear random patterns on your face with an infrared paint. The recognition software won't be able to lock on to you and the cops will only see some vaseline-like smudges if they get close.
Problem: Who sells infrared paint?

I don't think there is an "infra red" paint as such. There may be some pigments that absorb IR light and others that reflect it, but I doubt they are transparent. The infra red light you see from your remote is light that has had all the visible portion of the spectrum either filtered out or is from a diode that doesn't generate light in the visible range of the spectrum.

This is an interesting idea though. When I worked in a large commercial darkroom we had night vision goggles (essentially an IR camera) and everyone looked the same. Black or white we all glowed.

Coign;648244 wrote:

Why aren't we?

It is my own damn business if I would like to walk down a street in front of a bank without having Big Brother watching my every move.

I don't want, need, or should have a babysitter looking over my shoulder every time I want to leave the house.

I like they have security cameras at banks. I don't want them watching me go pee or try on clothes.

How about walking down the sidewalk?

I don't care so much about cameras on private property, like inside stores. I don't like being filmed while walking down the sidewalk. There's a camera at least every block here.

Maybe I should bring my camera to work tomorrow and take a picture of every camera pointed at me along my commute. At least the ones I can see. It would take a while. I'd have to walk slow and really look around so I wouldn't miss any. They are so small now.

You gotta admit, that is a very different area than where most of us live/work.

It's not any different in this regard than any US city downtown area. I'm not walking past any secure government installations where these cameras are.

Maybe you could just put a red square around your face.

We've had this discussion before.
Somewhere.
I don't remember where.

Hang on, let me rewind and see what was being filmed over my shoulder at the time....

Seriously, I only remember because Bruce called me out on an inconsistency. He was right to, and it made me think more about being on CCTV. In the end I still concluded that it's really nothing to worry about.

Look! I'm waving at you all now!
(And Shawnee is humming in the shower)

It'd be just my luck that the day I decided I was fed up with being watched by big brother and donned the asymmetrical face paint, my doppelganger would ice that bitch I've been complaining about....

Those paint jobs didn't help Valeria when that snake came shooting into her.
She was hot. :cry::facepalm:









Sandahl Bergman