Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 |
Adversarial Pattern Shirts Confound Object Detection Systems
Computers are getting way too good at identifying us (systems in China are taking masks into account).
(Bright adversarial pattern shirt)
It turns out, confounding software into not realizing what it's looking at is a matter of fooling several different smaller systems at once.Think about a person, for example. Now think of a person who looks nothing like that. And now do it again. Humanity, after all, contains multitudes, and a person can have many different appearances. A machine learning system needs to understand the diverse array of different inputs that, put together, mean "person." A nose by itself won't do it; an eye alone will not suffice; anything could have a mouth. But put dozens or hundreds of those priors together, and you've got enough for an object detector.
Code does not "think" in terms of facial features, the way a human does, but it does look for and classify features in its own way. To foil it, the "cloaks" need to interfere with most or all of those priors. Simply obscuring some of them is not enough. Facial recognition systems used in China, for example, have been trained to identify people who are wearing medical masks while trying to prevent the spread of COVID-19 or other illnesses.
And of course, to make the task even more challenging, different object detection frameworks all use different mechanisms to detect people, Goldstein explained. "We have different cloaks that are designed for different kinds of detectors, and they transfer across detectors, and so a cloak designed for one detector might also work on another detector," he said.
Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, in his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly, described a scramble suit, a device that enables the wearer to defy description, both in person and in surveillance videos:
(Explanatory Scramble suit video from the movie version)
The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers... Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.
(Read more about Philip K. Dick's scramble suit)
I love this story, take a look at similar instances:
- Let's Hear It For The Vague Blur!
- Face Recognition Now Sees Through Disguises
- HyperFace Aims To Foil Facial Recognition
- Camouflage To Confound Face Recognition
- RealFace Glamoflage T-Shirt Like PKD's Scramble Suit
- CV Dazzle Anti-Surveillance Make-Up
- Project KOVR Fashion Protection From Infosphere
- Deep Learning Creates New Faces
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/29/2020)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion ( 0 )
Related News Stories - (" Surveillance ")
FTC: Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers
'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.' - Pournelle and Niven, 1981.)
Perching Ambush Drones
'On the chest of drawers something was perched.' - Philip K. Dick, 1956.
India Ponders Always-On Smartphone Location Tracking
'It is necessary... for your own protection.' - Jack Vance, 1954.
LingYuan Vehicle Roof Drones Now Available, ala Blade Runner 2049
Accompanied by a small selection of similar ideas from science fiction.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
AI Operates An Excavator
'So far as I could see, the thing was without a directing Martian at all.'
US Army IBEX Exoskeleton Walks Troops Out Of Danger
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
Boy Makes Biomimetic Turtle Robot
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
Elon Musk Wants Data Centers In Space
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
Origin F1 Humanoid Robot's Facial Skin
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
Grok And The City Fathers From 'Cities In Flight' By James Blish
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
Why Not Move A Warehouse District?
'Did you never see a moving house before?'
Will An AI Found A New Religion?
'You must decide how you will worship Me.'
Terraformer Industries Make Methane
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display
'Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre...'
Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
Muxcard Redditor's DIY Credit Card-Sized Computer
It's a computer, but just barely.
'Soft Assembly' Fashions That Fashion Themselves On The Wearer
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
Orwell's Nightmare Of AI-Written Novels Comes To Pass
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
ISS Plagued By Leak - Again!
'There were perhaps a dozen bladder-like objects in the tunnel...'
Ridiculous 'Ghost Murmur' Tech Still Science Fiction
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
