(New Scientist) Ditch the hat and scarf – it’s not fooling anyone. Face recognition software can now see through your cunning disguise – even you are wearing a mask.
Amarjot Singh at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues trained a machine learning algorithm to locate 14 key facial points. These are the points the human brain pays most attention to when we look at someone’s face.
The researchers then hand-labelled 2000 photos of people wearing hats, glasses, scarves and fake beards to indicate the location of those same key points, even if they couldn’t be seen. The algorithm looked at a subset of these images to learn how the disguised faces corresponded with the undisguised faces.
The system accurately identified people a wearing scarf 77 per cent of the time – a cap and scarf 69 per cent of the time and a cap, scarf and glasses 55 per cent of the time. This isn’t as good as systems that recognise undisguised human faces, but it is the best at seeing through disguises, says Singh.
