Portland, Oregon has long been known as a hotbed for protests, and this past weekend there were more protests and arrests.
The IFC show "Portlandia" even made fun of the city's love affair with protesting.
Although most protesters are peaceful, some have worn masks, bandanas, and hoodies to hide their identities. TV cameras have watched them commit acts that damage the city and then slip away.
It is hard to find and charge an anonymous individual whose face is hidden, right?
Brand new research from a team at the University of Cambridge, the Indian Institute of Science, and India’s National Institute of Technology may change that.AI used to recognize faces, even when disguised
What if your outer right eyebrow could give your identity away? Or that unique shape you have just in the center of your lip? These are exactly the things the researchers were able to use, collectively, to identify someone. They are calling it "disguised face identification."
The recently published paper introduces a new "facial key-point detection framework," and you can see the points analyzed in the photo above. These are the points used to detect facial structure.
Next, in the image below, you can see what researchers used to hide identities in their AI testing. "The
Heat signatures are used, which allows AI to detect key facial shapes underneath disguises, as you see in the following two images.
The success rates were extremely high in many cases, and the researchers compared their work to those that have come before it: "The framework is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art methods on key-point detection and face disguise classification."
An unsettling thought for protestors in Portland—and anyone else who wishes to remain anonymous.
Cover image: KATU-TV
