Could a Shirt Fool Facial Recognition? The Answer Is Complicated
A camera and its software labeled Bill Swearingen as a person. Then it suddenly wasn’t sure — all because of some weird pattern that he held up to disguise himself.
I watched it happen from my seat at annual hacker convention Defcon. Swearingen, a longtime cybersecurity professional and founder of the Kansas City security community SecKC, stood onstage in front of a live camera feed as a person-detection system analyzed him. On the giant screen behind him, the software’s confidence score cleared 0.75, the threshold it needed to declare that, yes, there was a human being in the frame.
Then Swearingen raised a flat panel covered in a bizarre black-and-white pattern. The score started falling. It slipped below the threshold, eventually landing at 0.21.
“No person detected,” the screen announced in bright green letters.
It felt like a low-budget magic trick. Swearingen was still standing there, plainly visible to...
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