9/28/21, 7:10 PM Simple make-up tips can help you avoid face recognition software | New Scientist

Simple make-up tips can help you avoid face

recognition software

TECHNOLOGY
24 September 2021
By Chris Stokel-Walker

A symbolic representation of the power of face recognition tools

Jochen Tack / Alamy

Face recognition algorithms can be foiled by a dab of strategically applied make-up that is
subtle enough not to draw human attention.

Face recognition software is used in smartphones and similar technology – and also by the
police. As such, there is interest in finding ways to fool the system.

Nitzan Guetta at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and colleagues have
developed AI software that can suggest where to apply make-up to trick face recognition
systems into thinking a person’s identity has changed.

Tested against real-world face recognition technology, make-up applied according to the
recommendations of the software could foil the system 98.8 per cent of the time. Across all
people, the face recognition software could identify someone successfully 47.6 per cent of
the time, but this dropped to 1.2 per cent with the make-up applied.

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9/28/21, 7:10 PM Simple make-up tips can help you avoid face recognition software | New Scientist

The AI is built using an adversarial machine learning system, which pits two algorithms
against each other – one designed to seek solutions to a problem, the other to identify
flaws in the potential solutions.

The adversarial system tries to reverse-engineer facial recognition models by seeing which
elements of a person’s visage the models see as unique. The results, shown as a heat map
on an image of a person’s face, highlight areas that face recognition systems believe best
identify an individual.

Read more: Fooling AI can now be done a thousand times faster

That digital heat map is then used to create a digital make-up projection that can be used
in the real world to apply make-up to those specific areas to change the perceived shape of
the face. As anyone who has used a contouring brush on their face before knows, a little
make-up can make a big difference.

Tested on 10 men and 10 women aged 20 to 28, wearing the make-up dropped the face
recognition success rate from 42.6 per cent to 0.9 per cent in women and from 52.5 per
cent to 1.5 per cent in men.

What makes the system so clever, says Mariann Hardey at Durham University, UK, is that it
doesn’t rely on gaudy colour palettes. Instead, the adversarial system is limited to using
natural make-up hues. That’s important because it lets people try to simultaneously avoid
recognition while not drawing attention to themselves: pre-existing research shows
wearing outlandishly patterned clothes can foil such systems, but they look obviously like
an attempt to avoid detection.

“Facial contouring may become more than a TikTok trend, and such make-up may become
the next wave to protect one’s privacy in public from automatic facial recognition
systems,” says Hardey.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/2109.06467

More on these topics: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGY FACIAL RECOGNITION

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