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Face Recognition Now Sees Through Disguises
A face recognition system has just been developed that can actually see through disguises. Lin Huang, of Florida Atlantic University, and colleagues Hanqi Zhuang and Salvatore Morgera in the Department of Electrical Engineering, have developed a new and improved algorithm.
Obviously, the disguise "arms race" has just heated up. Can it penetrate even science-fictional disguises?
Consider the scramble suit from Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly:
The team tested the performance of their new algorithm on a standard database of 400 images of 40 subjects. Images are grey scale and just 92 x 112 pixels in size. They found that their technique is not only faster and works with low resolution images, such as those produced by standard CCTV cameras, but also solves the variation problems caused by different light levels and shadows, viewing direction, pose, and facial expressions. It can even see through certain types of disguises such as facial hair and glasses.
"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."
(Explanatory Scramble suit video from the movie version)
"...the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him - or her - was meaningless."
Beat that, face recognition algorithm designers.
Via Physorg.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/16/2009)
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