Circumvent Facial Recognition With Yarn

Abstraction: Knitted anti-surveillance garment using adversarial face patterns

Key points:

• Artist Ottilia Westerlund knitted a sweater using the Hyperface pattern (designed by Adam Harvey) to confuse facial detection systems
• Hyperface presents multiple fake "face" stimuli to Viola-Jones based detectors, distracting them from actual human faces
• The knitted version fails against modern neural-network-based facial detection, which is now more prevalent than Viola-Jones
• Westerlund notes knitting as "programmable material" containing FOR loops and pattern structures; WWII UK banned handmade knitwear shipments due to steganographic espionage uses
• Highlights the cat-and-mouse dynamic between adversarial camouflage and increasingly robust CV systems

Connections: Adam Harvey · Facial Recognition · Adversarial Examples · Computer Vision

Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/16/circumvent-facial-recognition-with-yarn/