Or be a foreigner here using an ESTA. Generally committing crimes after giving the government every little piece of information about you is a bad idea.
These seem much less functional and more of a fashion statement. Defeating ALPR readers when you're not a car seems bizarre. Where the OP is actually actively protecting one's identity from being followed.
So even though the name says adversarial, how is it actually being adversarial?
"The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations."
They have mobile ALPR cameras mounted onto cars aimed at where one would suspect a license plate would be visible from that position. So, unless someone wearing a shirt like this is laying in the street, not likely.
Maybe places like parking garages would have some mounted where a person wearing one of these might walk by, but the significantly small numbers would make any junk data insignificant. So, I cannot imagine these being useful to that end. Other cameras like traffic cameras or toll boths or similar mounting locations would also not be hampered by these shirts unless you make them into a complete body wrap for the car.
However, I do see them being useful as conversation starters when someone asks WTF you're wearing. It would have a much better chance of increasing awareness of ALPR tech and possibly other camera tracking tech in general. But even that is pretty much meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
I'm surprised nobody is producing swag with the EURion constellation[0] on it. You'd be surprised how many random image processing libraries it breaks.
The strobing seems to defeat the effect -- you only need one good frame with a face showing to defeat the hoodie, and this seemed slow enough that I could pick up the face of the demo guy with my own eyes in realtime.
Seems like the strobing is intended to defeat the autoexposure compensation. Otherwise the camera might see the brightlight and reduce exposure to compensate. Concentrating the lighting on the face only and staying far away from cameras might help that without requiring the strobe.
The leds are placed on the chest -- seems like a miss to not place them also around the hoodie near the face. I would suspect even without strobing the over saturation would work should those leds be surrounding the face.
All of that said, wearing something like this out (unless it becomes super commonplace lol) just screams watch me closely (and easily follow me back to some known origin).
> The leds are placed on the chest -- seems like a miss to not place them also around the hoodie near the face.
Based on the documentation, all that would probably do is allow the effect to work at slightly closer distances:
> In addition, the LEDs need to be a minimum distance from the camera to be effective, as the cone of light from them needs to be wide enough to overlap with the cameras view of the wearers head. In practice, this is about 12ft (~3m).
Putting them on the chest would help with ergonomics. It would work even if you have the hood off and the LEDs would be more consistently positioned.
FR developer here: that strobing is very smart, as the mechanical mechanism starts to adjust the strobe generates another adjustment. If the strobing is at a random interval, it becomes difficult to impossible to compensate in software. FR does not work without face images.
I would think randomizing the strobing would be effective as well. All of this defeating of auto exposure adjustments makes me think back to the days of Macrovision and how easily it could be defeated as it was not randomized at all. Then again, it was also easily just stripped out of the signal.
With random timing, you're more likely to get one period that's long enough for the auto-exposure to correct it and see the face. Autoexposure takes time because it has to use a feedback loop to search for the correct exposure, so if the brightness changes fast enough, it can't keep up.
you set a maximum on period so that doesn't happen. if you develop something with a known pattern, that can be programed in to be countered. hence my example of Macrovision. randomizing the values means it is much harder to counter.
That's what they say, but how much autofocusing is actually happening? In the example video the scene is mostly in focus. My guess is it actually messes with the exposure rather than focus.
Agreed that was not a good demo. I assumed that segment was not taken with a cheap webcam/security camera - which is why the auto-exposure worked a lot faster.
At a greater distance with lower MP security cameras, this thing might still work.
Gait analysis is a more surveillable fingerprint anyway, since it can work with lower resolution cameras. Tag someone on a high res camera with facial recognition and as long as you've seen their gait once, you'll be able to identify them again.
I don't think gait analysis would hold itself through a trial or be bought by a jury. Maybe to correlate different videos of possibly different suspects? But if you are getting regularly videoed by security cameras while circumventing rules you are probably already wearing different shoes or pants and that can go a long way to defeat gait analysis algos.
It's quite literally more accurate than fingerprint or blood splatter analysis and those send people to prison on a daily basis - despite being little more than snake oil techniques.
Has gait analysis been studied by people other than the ones selling gait monitoring equipment? It smells to me like bite mark analysis, blood splatter analysis, polygraphs, and other "miracle" technologies/techniques that turned out to be horsecrap.
There are people I know that I can recognize by the way they walk, so the idea is at least plausible. I think the main problem is/will be from using the analysis inappropriately.
It's one thing to narrow down a city-sized population to a list of 50 people known to walk with a similar gait, and then follow up with other forms of investigation before drawing conclusions. It's another for a cop to look at the top match and go arrest that guy, as they've done more than once with facial recognition.
The person knows no cameras exist doing gait detection, but wants one. They make a random comment on HN, a forum known to be read by people that is full of people will take an idea to completion "over a weekend", as a challenge to get someone to do something for $1000. That's a ridiculously low amount for something to come into existence that would serve their need directly. Hell, there's probably people here that would do something like this for the clout.
No, I know that where security cameras are positioned and the amount of processing they currently have there will be no gait analysis being done on the camera itself. They have enough trouble telling one person from another reliably.
I was being facetious as I don't believe hackernews readership is that enterprising.
There have been pretty huge leaps over partially obstructed facial recognition algorithms in the last few years -- I think state of the art is approaching no meaningful loss of match mask vs no mask.
This is not my understanding, I have read at least 7 or 8 papers that seem to have for various models and techniques reduced the delta between masked and unmasked recognition to be very similar on false positive and positive rates.
That said I have no insight as to how many of these techniques have been found to scale well or have started to make it into product. It has been publicly reported that NEC’s NeoFace (a system that many police and govt use) newer versions does indeed have occlusion (mask) recognition operating at very high levels.
anyways thats just my understanding as an interested bystander -- not in the field.
iPhone face unlock has worked while wearing a mask for a while now.
You know how you can identify exactly which family member is walking in the door from across the house, and maybe even what mood they're in? Or how little clarity you need to identify your child or spouse on a 480p camera feed? That's what machine learning makes possible across all types of sensor input, picking out those little but distinct patterns. There's really no way to be anonymous in public once ML surveillance software is widespread.
IF you submit a UK GDPR DSAR or equivalent in your own country, the cops will deliberately not hand over the data, including Axiom bodycam footage, under the pretence its all used for law enforcement purposes, which the legislation lets them do. I know, I've tried. I've even been told its up to the individual officer whether they want to submit their bodycam footage, which is a great way for the police to cover up crimes, considering they already have the option to switch on the recording, and these bodycams have a 30sec buffer which gets included when they enable recording. Police cars also have built in AV recording to monitor what goes on inside a police car.
You would be amazed at how criminal the Police in the UK really are, they do a good job of PR on social media and the press doing them favours to get leads on stories.
You are better off having your own stealth AV devices recording your every move and sound 24/7, built into jewellery, head torches, clothing, dash cams for vehicles, and smart phones recording all the time, so you dont even have to bother taking a photo or video, just point and record. And where possible have it streamed live back to your servers with a dead man's switch.
Its the only way to combat the intelligent entity's who seek to dominate.
> the wyze cameras that make my own surveillance around my home
They are too obvious, if you have a brick property, put a few bee/insect bricks at different heights into the walls and then drill through from the inside of the property and put a slim line camera like the AXIS P12 Modular Camera Series in one of the larger bee/insect holes. Doesnt matter then if the individual has their face facing the ground, which is lot of the time, you'll still get a good image of their face.
You can find even cheaper cam's if you search aliexpress.com.
It's a crime in the country where I live, article 138.1 of the Criminal Code. Illegal manufacturing, purchase or sale of special technical means intended for covert acquisition of information.
It's even more fun when the law explicitly permits[0] recording of the violation of the law but police and judges would do anything (and succeed!) declaring what that time it wasn't permitted or... wasn't violation of the law, so you couldn't record.
[0] "doesn't forbid" would be more accurate description
At least in China face recognition software is good enough that they can recognize people even when wearing covid mask. I mean even iphone face id works with masks, scarfs, sunglasses and in the dark (i didn't test all at same time so maybe there is hope...). So if you want to be anonymous then you can't, sorry, thats the world we live in currently.
Protest organizers should hand out these hoodies, or someone should sell them to protestors through some kind of pop-up shop ambassador program where an affiliate at each protest sells the apparel on consignment.
The documentation lists its limitations, which include daylight:
> The Camera Shy Hoodie is not an end-all-be-all for hiding your identity. It’s good for one thing, blowing out the view of night vision (IR) cameras in low light environments. It’s not effective in sunlight, most indoor lighting, or against conventional cameras. In fact, you will draw attention to yourself if you wear this in a context in which the security
cameras are actively monitored. In the view of an IR camera, it’ll look as if you’re flashing a light directly at the lens. In addition, the LEDs need to be a minimum distance from the camera to be effective, as the cone of light from them needs to be wide enough to overlap with the cameras view of the wearers head. In practice, this is about 12ft (~3m).
The idea is designed to exploit limitations with the camera's auto-exposure, and I presume a requirement to do that is to strobe a light that outshines the ambient light by n times. That works at night because there's so little ambient light, during the day you'd have to outshine the sun (and the sun is really bright).
Depending on where you live, wearing a mask (as in: face covering, not the COVID masks) at a public protest or demonstration can be a punishable offense forbidden by law… and I'm not talking about autocratic states but many civilized and relatively liberal Western countries, cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law
> For example, The Georgia Supreme Court found the law constitutional on the grounds that the wearing of the mask was an act of intimidation and a threat of violence
Women wear masks ever day with their make up, and also documented with filters on social media. Bet the courts didnt think of masks in that context did they?
I don't see where you would get that from my comment, which didn't name any country. The point was that the wiki article I pointed to does list quite a number of countries, of which several do fall into the group of “liberal Western countries”. Nobody said that _all_ countries listed there do.
I didnt get taught law, its not something that is a compulsory subject to teach and the adult population certainly doesnt get taught about the upgrades or changes to law, so I cant have a democratic debate over the laws that exist.
Ergo we are living in a legal dictatorship that put Mussolini to shame, but as most people dont know who he is, thats a point thats wasted on people.
Why is the state hell bent on removing everyone's privacy as well?
These anti-mask laws are designed to harm the public, especially when considering the riot police will be balaclava'ed up and in full riot gear.
If the scientific community especially at Uni, werent such pussy's there would be psychological paper's that exist demonstrating the provocative nature of the riot gear uniform, using military techniques, because the police and military share many training elements.
Representative democracy is a trick to cede autonomy over one's actions, so if you needed a way to control a population en-masse, this would be a disarmingly charming way to achieve this objective, the sort of thing a self attracted sociopath would come up with, and something that continues to attract sociopaths with narcissistic attributes around the world to this day!
It is honestly just a terrible idea - you are essentially placing a target on yourself, no matter how you use it. Simply scanning a crowd of people with a camera, you are identifying people protesting from other civilians, in real-time and no cost. If you watched a crowd from above, over time you could find all sorts of patterns. In some countries, that could mean your whole family disappears.
The only groups I see benefitting from this are the agents of oppressive regimes, and the meth heads breaking into your storage shed at night and stealing your bike.
FYI check your local laws, this is almost certainly criminal in at least some places (e.g. in Germany it's illegal to "wear things which may prevent or interfere with identification of protestors" and to "carry items meant to interfere with identification", this clearly meets those criteria).
With that being said, it is not illegal to attempt / to succeed at escaping a imprisonment as the will to be free is an unalienable human right under German law.
German police usually has a bunch of people (and cars with pole-mounted cameras) running around with cameras filming everyone at regular protests; you'd think nothing can happen without being taped. Except of course it often goes <FOOTAGE MISSING> when it gets interesting, seems to be a technical issue. Just like bodycams suddenly failing to work. Oh well
The primary qualifier here is this isn't American police. Use of force, excessive use of force, and lethal use of force are much, much rarer here. Police kills about a dozen people per year. Not over a thousand. Though worryingly this number has risen a lot in the last couple years, it used to be more like half a dozen ten years ago.
Regardless, when it happens, it's still a police force, so you still have esprit de corps, "blue wall of silence" and "DA doesn't feel like prosecuting people they work with day to day" effects, and evidence is quite frequently not gathered or "gets lost". So for example if there is excessive use of force at a protest it wouldn't be unusual for those recordings to be misplaced. Bodycams aren't universal yet, but they're always somehow turned off during excessive use of force. The latest example would be a 16yo refugee who was shot dead with an MP5 (i.e. not standard-issue-24/7-belt-carry for police, something you have to get from the car), all officers had bodycams, no recordings. Five officers were charged with various things (up to 2nd degree homicide) because a citizen made an audio recording of the police action (which is a felony btw.), revealing contradictory and false statements.
My googling has been failing to find info about the bodycams etc in this case. Do you have a link?
Additionally, do you have any figures, even very approximate, for what proportion of the time police bodycams are worn and on and what proportion of incidents have said camera turned off? This helps see if there's a real mismatch/incidence of corruption here.
In Germany? “Some people in the crowd started to mask their faces“ is THE excuse for authorities to stop protests. You cannot seriously argue this doesn’t happen at e.g. 1st of May protests.
[0] I mean that in a legal sense, that's how the police works. Whether stopping the protest is morally the right thing to do or not is a different issue that I don't want to address here.
If you think German police(*) of all police forces goes easy on lefties you are completely delusional.
(*) The generalization is okay in this context, because behavior is pretty uniform and larger protests will have riot police pulled from other states anyway.
Be realistic, 'everyone should wear this to provide cover to people in stealth mode' is not a sensible security plan outside of an extremely limited number of contexts. I hate security camera theater and panopticons most than most people, and I have exactly zero expectation of this becoming A Thing.
That's why you put a pebble in your shoe. Then after enough years you take it out like Piccolo dropping his weighted clothes and, like Harrison Bergeron in the story, defy the authoritarian state with dance.
Granted vr telemetry is based off of multiple cameras tracking a single individual - still, one wonders how hard it would be to cover a crowd with specific aim of identification and tracking?
For all practical purposes, it is impossible in the current state of security/surveillance video footage.
The example described in the paper in your link is using cameras that are setup to provide very high resolution images of people. It would be like using full-frame portrait images for face recognition, and then expecting that to translate to real-world scenarios where you might only have 20 pixels on a face, and the person is off-axis to the camera.
Gait detection has been discussed for a while, and may definitely be a thing one day, but right now we are barely at the point where pose estimation is a thing in security video. Very far from being able to do high precision pose recognition and sampling over successive frames to model something that would qualify as "gait".
you don’t have to commit a crime to wear this. you can wear it as a statement, in which case attracting that kind of attention so that you can say — ideally to someone with authority — “i don’t think it’s right to surveil the public like this” is arguably some measure of success.
Given that the cops have never needed much of a reason to illegally beat people up, I admire anyone who cares about making that statement so much that they're willing to risk it.
Indeed, this is only really useful if the cameras aren't actively being monitored. If you're the odd one out wearing this at a protest, you might be specifically targeted.
Thats assuming they can figure out which one is wearing the hoodie. With enough evidence I can see them going for a guy with that, but they would have to not only make the decision to specifically target you, but to figure out which one of the hoodies moving around is causing the issue
I think in the scenario this is trying to defeat, they already know who most of the other people are because their facial recognition software worked & they're already looking at their socials, purchase history, etc. All the 3 letter agencies are using this info, plus whatever else they have to construct some kind of case against them.
So, they become the low hanging fruit. The more resources we give our TLA's, the less this matters, of course :)
Ive often wondered if shirts with Epaulets equipped with LED IR lights might provide a shroud - or a jacket /hat/helmet with an IR array would always be a good thing.
Imagine Epaletts-like-strips of IR/UV LEDs connecting with magnets to any garment.
Or low cost strips of IR LEDs glued to some neodymian magnets which are attachable to camera shrouds.
Else - Epoxy filled paint-ball rounds to be shot at cameras to obscure view, or fast-dry epoxy rounds for shooting at drones/kill-bot joints.
If you havea BostonDynamics B.I.T.C.H. (Battle Intelligent Tactical Canine Hunter) after you - shoot its joints with epoxy that freezes its legs/joints/sensors)
EDIT: - This is what every Major, Col, Gen should have in their leafs and stars:
>>"Ive often wondered if shirts with Epaulets equipped with LED IR lights might provide a shroud"
Every general/col/maj should have this technology integrated in uniform.
You dont wear these in combat (under certain circumstances) (( you develop different frequencies/delivery mthods, but I think your point is more valid.
Yes you can thwart via, but then - you wind up just tracking anyone with it.
Thus you need a "rain" of micro particles in a crowd where every single particle sets off said "anti-sensors"
How cyberpunk do you want to get with the designs?
Yes. The hard part is having an "R2" which constantly searches from a back-pack with a painter scattering for cams which can then take offense/deffense that sees said cams and either paints with laser or chem-a-lized paint gun pellets with aluminum paste and epoxy mix... disabling both movement and measure.
This creates an anomaly on any surveillance to the point you will get exact time / date and you will be able to get people that can be asked what you look like.
It’s like a padlock. Won’t keep people who try hard enough out, but will keep most modest efforts out. Also, this would prevent a detection from occurring at all, so there wouldn’t be an anomaly any more than a trash can not being detected as a human would.
Dark sunglasses, a baseball cap and an N95 mask work better than flashing a huge light on video surveillance and also deterring people to remember a face and doing it this way gives no date and time information.
Maybe I'm missing the point since both deter automated face recognition but then you could add to the classifier this huge light source as another thing to recognize.
Privacy is both important and valuable. However, during the product demonstration, was it truly necessary to have the actor dressed entirely in black, walking into someone's backyard? What specific use case do they believe they are showcasing with this demonstration?
Do you have a source or something? I'm not trying to doubt you but I'm interested in learning further. I work on cameras with IR emitter and there are many safety protocols, emitter covers, warning signs, etc. for a simple IR camera that we are instructed to abide by.
I work with a company that makes high-power IR illuminators and we just went through certification testing with some units that are roughly 100x the output power of this example and they did not pose an eye hazard.
There is a bunch of stuff online about exposure to IR-A wavelengths, which covers the common IR LED/illuminator wavelengths. You certainly CAN build something which can cause various kinds of eye damage, but it is going to be a unit that you can literally feel the heat off of. For practical purposes, you couldn't make a wearable battery powered device that would be likely to cause eye damage without the entire thing being very large and unwieldy, assuming of course you are using standard incoherent (eg:non-laser) source.
The actually invisible NIR is 940nm but generally IR therapy devices come with blockout goggles like you'd use in a tanning bed.
I'm not sure the power levels of this hoodie but if you're 3 meters away from an LED it's way different from if you are 10cm away.. I wouldn't assume safety when making up new use cases for a 'safe' product.
Wouldn't IR filters defeat this once it becomes an issue? You can just glue them on the front of the lens or it can be on the sensor though the latter requires a new sensor.
This would not be highly effective with most modern security cameras.
First, color low-light video is becoming more common, as image sensor technology has progressed. When a digital/surveillance camera is in color mode, there is an IR filter in front of the lens to remove these wavelengths from reaching the imager (they cause color tinge issues).
Even for cameras that are not in color mode in low-light video, most newer units have good dynamic range, whereas these low-power IR LEDs would likely not be able to fully obscure a persons face in the video.
Not every color camera has an IR filter, many phones and webcam lack such a filter and can see IR very well (on my phone it has a distinctive purple hue).
Probably this tint is compensated for in normal light.
That distinctive purple hue is a result of the IR filter. Filters on consumer cameras don't block 100% of IR, which is visible as that purple color. Useful for checking if remotes are working properly.
I don't think it's because of the IR filter. I have removed filters from several color webcams and they always see IR as purpley. I think it's the bayer filter - the different color channels clearly have different sensitivities to IR.
Yeah, what I mean is the existence, the visibility of a slight purple hue. If the camera has no IR filter, you don't just see a slight purple hue on the LED itself, but you see the light just like you'd see a visible wavelength LED.
I actually was obsessed with IR cameras and mods for some reason around 10-12 years ago. I remember using developed empty photo films to block visible light and let only IR through after removing the IR filter.
If you look at a quantum efficiency chart you will find that CMOS sensors are actually sensitive to 850nm IR light almost identically at all photosites regardless of the colour filter and then they gradually decline together as the wavelength increases. The colour cast is mostly due to the tuning and white balance of the image.
I wonder if such strong IR light is capable of harming the eye, even if we're unable to see it.
High power LEDs in the visible spectrum are terribly bright, and when I accidentally get them shined into the eye, it really feels concerning if any harm has been done.
We can stare at a burning campfire and barely get damaged. Long term exposure is another thing. The emitter power would have to be insanely high, or some kind of laser.
Yes, but a campfire emits a lot of visible light, so our eyes adjust accordingly. While we're not cats with their amazing pupil dilation, we have some too. If one wears an IR-shiny hood, they may be at higher risk in the low-light conditions, if their eyes adjust to the dark, brain not realizing they're flooded with IR.
Retinal damage is not the only kind of damage the eye can be subjected to. The cornea has no blood flow to cool itself and is fully exposed to incoming radiation.
A campfire has radiance limited by its temperature. It can put out a lot of power, but that power can't be focused to a high energy density at your retina. An LED can be nearly a point source, and can deposit a lot of power at a small spot, i.e., "almost a laser." Moreover, being invisible, an IR LED doesn't cause your pupil to close. And LEDs have gotten powerful enough to be dangerous. The regulations for optical radiation exposure now cover LEDs as well as lasers.
"If you buy the largest IR floodlight available on Amazon and you stare at it 200 mm (~7") from your face for more than 1000 seconds (~ 16 minutes) there is a possibility you might damage your cornea. So don’t do that. And I doubt anyone would do that because these things get pretty hot at that distance."
Near-IR aiming lasers (such as the AN/PEQ-2 and AN/PAQ-4) can indeed cause permanent damage, among USAF CATM armorers there was a rumor of at least one idiot burning his retina trying to "see" the beam directly.
No, older smart phone cameras lacked IR filters because the IR filter didn't only block IR light, but also a distribution of wavelengths around IR. Filtering out IR means many of the visible light wavelengths are attenuated as well, decreasing the amount of light arriving at the sensor.
With better noise reduction algorithms, more sensitive sensors and lower noise sensors, IR filters are now almost always used in smart phone cameras.
Also, without an IR filter those cameras could partially see through light clothing in bright conditions. This of course formed a creepy online community and enough backlash that the manufacturers decided to include IR filters for all future products.
I work with IR sensors at work and modern smartphones pick up NIR frequencies as well. It's picked up by the red channel so combining that with the blue is probably what's making the purple color.
My guess would be that something bright enough to wash out the red channel would still leave the blue and green intact. So there should be enough information that the image is degraded but not necessarily blinded.
But I could be wrong, depending on how independently the color sensors and processing work.
Our gated community spent $80,000 on upgrading their cameras system and bought state-of-the-art 5MP surveillance cams (total of 5 of them) that "lets you read license plates from within 100 meters" and "does a color-in-the-night type recording". They were sold on upgrading the whole freaking network of cables to cat 9 for God only knows reason. And I kid you not - less than 2 months later, we were hit and 6 cars were stolen. Apparently it doesn't matter how fancy your camera is, if the perpetrator setup a stand alone red laser at cost of $6 that shines directly at it...
Reminds me of the time I was looking at my uncle's AV setup. Back then, you had multiple ways of delivering video between components: RCA, Composite and a variety of others.
The tech person had every possible path wired up with Monster video cables. A waste of probably $500!
For your gated community, it seems like a detection for the video feed going haywire that calls the cops might be useful.
I don't like the idea of a hoodie blasting high power IR which could easily get into your eyes. Perhaps it'd be better to make a camera-shy baseball cap.
Does it have A 100% FARADAY cage pocket to put the biometronomic tracking device (phone) within in addition to shield that, plus an array of UV lights to shim cams off?
if you really wanted this to work you would wear the strobes all over so they don't pick up arm movements or leg gait, i'd even go as far as all of your knees, feet, elbows, shoulders, and wrists/fingers
if you can eliminate your movements and shape then you're ahead of the game, otherwise you're identifiable
So all those digital video cameras that are pointing around to be used in visible light or low light conditions (like those for retail surveillance) will now have a person with a blinking light on them as people look at the closed circuit feeds during regular business hours.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadhttps://adversarialfashion.com/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv8j8w/a-tattoo-and-an-etsy-...
So even though the name says adversarial, how is it actually being adversarial?
I wonder if it does.
Maybe places like parking garages would have some mounted where a person wearing one of these might walk by, but the significantly small numbers would make any junk data insignificant. So, I cannot imagine these being useful to that end. Other cameras like traffic cameras or toll boths or similar mounting locations would also not be hampered by these shirts unless you make them into a complete body wrap for the car.
However, I do see them being useful as conversation starters when someone asks WTF you're wearing. It would have a much better chance of increasing awareness of ALPR tech and possibly other camera tracking tech in general. But even that is pretty much meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
I guess it's time to haul out the t-shirt press...
Just need to head over to redbubble now.
All of that said, wearing something like this out (unless it becomes super commonplace lol) just screams watch me closely (and easily follow me back to some known origin).
Based on the documentation, all that would probably do is allow the effect to work at slightly closer distances.
Based on the documentation, all that would probably do is allow the effect to work at slightly closer distances:
> In addition, the LEDs need to be a minimum distance from the camera to be effective, as the cone of light from them needs to be wide enough to overlap with the cameras view of the wearers head. In practice, this is about 12ft (~3m).
Putting them on the chest would help with ergonomics. It would work even if you have the hood off and the LEDs would be more consistently positioned.
At a greater distance with lower MP security cameras, this thing might still work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18401892
I like the comment about the Ministry of Silly Walks.
It's one thing to narrow down a city-sized population to a list of 50 people known to walk with a similar gait, and then follow up with other forms of investigation before drawing conclusions. It's another for a cop to look at the top match and go arrest that guy, as they've done more than once with facial recognition.
I was being facetious as I don't believe hackernews readership is that enterprising.
I thought I once saw on Reddit that target already uses this in stores. I could be wrong.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1917222117
or bite marks forensics, aka we can make it work against any guy prosecutor picks
In real world without someone to fram^^^compare to it seems pretty useless https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/washingtondc/ne...
It is most certainly not, unless you’re talking straight on well lit training data.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/16/7310 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589632... ...
That said I have no insight as to how many of these techniques have been found to scale well or have started to make it into product. It has been publicly reported that NEC’s NeoFace (a system that many police and govt use) newer versions does indeed have occlusion (mask) recognition operating at very high levels.
anyways thats just my understanding as an interested bystander -- not in the field.
iPhone face unlock has worked while wearing a mask for a while now.
You know how you can identify exactly which family member is walking in the door from across the house, and maybe even what mood they're in? Or how little clarity you need to identify your child or spouse on a 480p camera feed? That's what machine learning makes possible across all types of sensor input, picking out those little but distinct patterns. There's really no way to be anonymous in public once ML surveillance software is widespread.
It’s 2023 pandemic if you want to be anonymous wear a mask.
It does seem to only work against IR cameras though - presumably brightly lit scenes won't struggle.
You would be amazed at how criminal the Police in the UK really are, they do a good job of PR on social media and the press doing them favours to get leads on stories.
You are better off having your own stealth AV devices recording your every move and sound 24/7, built into jewellery, head torches, clothing, dash cams for vehicles, and smart phones recording all the time, so you dont even have to bother taking a photo or video, just point and record. And where possible have it streamed live back to your servers with a dead man's switch.
Its the only way to combat the intelligent entity's who seek to dominate.
You are living through a technological arms race.
They are too obvious, if you have a brick property, put a few bee/insect bricks at different heights into the walls and then drill through from the inside of the property and put a slim line camera like the AXIS P12 Modular Camera Series in one of the larger bee/insect holes. Doesnt matter then if the individual has their face facing the ground, which is lot of the time, you'll still get a good image of their face.
You can find even cheaper cam's if you search aliexpress.com.
Not when owning a stealth A/V device is a criminal offense
In the meantime, I'll carrying on breaking the law to carry on protecting myself, building up my portfolio of criminals!
[0] "doesn't forbid" would be more accurate description
It didn't work either with a baseball cap and a mask under the nose.
999/1000 people look similar. One is just a glowing sun of light.
Which one do you go take to the backroom?
The documentation lists its limitations, which include daylight:
> The Camera Shy Hoodie is not an end-all-be-all for hiding your identity. It’s good for one thing, blowing out the view of night vision (IR) cameras in low light environments. It’s not effective in sunlight, most indoor lighting, or against conventional cameras. In fact, you will draw attention to yourself if you wear this in a context in which the security cameras are actively monitored. In the view of an IR camera, it’ll look as if you’re flashing a light directly at the lens. In addition, the LEDs need to be a minimum distance from the camera to be effective, as the cone of light from them needs to be wide enough to overlap with the cameras view of the wearers head. In practice, this is about 12ft (~3m).
The idea is designed to exploit limitations with the camera's auto-exposure, and I presume a requirement to do that is to strobe a light that outshines the ambient light by n times. That works at night because there's so little ambient light, during the day you'd have to outshine the sun (and the sun is really bright).
In that particular case, it wold make far more sense to hand out a cost-reduced version that people could wear over their own clothes.
I'm thinking of something with the LEDs mounted in a plastic ring like these (https://www.glowuniverse.com/20-inch-glow-stick-necklaces-8-...), with a battery box/controller, and maybe some kind of protest messaged taped to it.
For protests, the best form of flattery is to be imitated, so this website [2] and others, lets you pay your respects and flatter the police.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask
[2] https://havengear.com/
So this is not that.
I don't see where you would get that from my comment, which didn't name any country. The point was that the wiki article I pointed to does list quite a number of countries, of which several do fall into the group of “liberal Western countries”. Nobody said that _all_ countries listed there do.
I didnt get taught law, its not something that is a compulsory subject to teach and the adult population certainly doesnt get taught about the upgrades or changes to law, so I cant have a democratic debate over the laws that exist.
Ergo we are living in a legal dictatorship that put Mussolini to shame, but as most people dont know who he is, thats a point thats wasted on people.
Why is the state hell bent on removing everyone's privacy as well?
These anti-mask laws are designed to harm the public, especially when considering the riot police will be balaclava'ed up and in full riot gear.
If the scientific community especially at Uni, werent such pussy's there would be psychological paper's that exist demonstrating the provocative nature of the riot gear uniform, using military techniques, because the police and military share many training elements.
Representative democracy is a trick to cede autonomy over one's actions, so if you needed a way to control a population en-masse, this would be a disarmingly charming way to achieve this objective, the sort of thing a self attracted sociopath would come up with, and something that continues to attract sociopaths with narcissistic attributes around the world to this day!
The only groups I see benefitting from this are the agents of oppressive regimes, and the meth heads breaking into your storage shed at night and stealing your bike.
Regardless, when it happens, it's still a police force, so you still have esprit de corps, "blue wall of silence" and "DA doesn't feel like prosecuting people they work with day to day" effects, and evidence is quite frequently not gathered or "gets lost". So for example if there is excessive use of force at a protest it wouldn't be unusual for those recordings to be misplaced. Bodycams aren't universal yet, but they're always somehow turned off during excessive use of force. The latest example would be a 16yo refugee who was shot dead with an MP5 (i.e. not standard-issue-24/7-belt-carry for police, something you have to get from the car), all officers had bodycams, no recordings. Five officers were charged with various things (up to 2nd degree homicide) because a citizen made an audio recording of the police action (which is a felony btw.), revealing contradictory and false statements.
Additionally, do you have any figures, even very approximate, for what proportion of the time police bodycams are worn and on and what proportion of incidents have said camera turned off? This helps see if there's a real mismatch/incidence of corruption here.
And putting on masks to obscure your face is illegal in protests in Germany.
See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermummungsverbot
[0] I mean that in a legal sense, that's how the police works. Whether stopping the protest is morally the right thing to do or not is a different issue that I don't want to address here.
(*) The generalization is okay in this context, because behavior is pretty uniform and larger protests will have riot police pulled from other states anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/how-hi-vis-yel...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeeovY4qNU
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/18/vr_telemetry_identity...
The example described in the paper in your link is using cameras that are setup to provide very high resolution images of people. It would be like using full-frame portrait images for face recognition, and then expecting that to translate to real-world scenarios where you might only have 20 pixels on a face, and the person is off-axis to the camera.
Gait detection has been discussed for a while, and may definitely be a thing one day, but right now we are barely at the point where pose estimation is a thing in security video. Very far from being able to do high precision pose recognition and sampling over successive frames to model something that would qualify as "gait".
So, they become the low hanging fruit. The more resources we give our TLA's, the less this matters, of course :)
Imagine Epaletts-like-strips of IR/UV LEDs connecting with magnets to any garment.
Or low cost strips of IR LEDs glued to some neodymian magnets which are attachable to camera shrouds.
Else - Epoxy filled paint-ball rounds to be shot at cameras to obscure view, or fast-dry epoxy rounds for shooting at drones/kill-bot joints.
If you havea BostonDynamics B.I.T.C.H. (Battle Intelligent Tactical Canine Hunter) after you - shoot its joints with epoxy that freezes its legs/joints/sensors)
EDIT: - This is what every Major, Col, Gen should have in their leafs and stars:
>>"Ive often wondered if shirts with Epaulets equipped with LED IR lights might provide a shroud"
Every general/col/maj should have this technology integrated in uniform.
Yes you can thwart via, but then - you wind up just tracking anyone with it.
Thus you need a "rain" of micro particles in a crowd where every single particle sets off said "anti-sensors"
How cyberpunk do you want to get with the designs?
Maybe I'm missing the point since both deter automated face recognition but then you could add to the classifier this huge light source as another thing to recognize.
There is a bunch of stuff online about exposure to IR-A wavelengths, which covers the common IR LED/illuminator wavelengths. You certainly CAN build something which can cause various kinds of eye damage, but it is going to be a unit that you can literally feel the heat off of. For practical purposes, you couldn't make a wearable battery powered device that would be likely to cause eye damage without the entire thing being very large and unwieldy, assuming of course you are using standard incoherent (eg:non-laser) source.
I'm not sure the power levels of this hoodie but if you're 3 meters away from an LED it's way different from if you are 10cm away.. I wouldn't assume safety when making up new use cases for a 'safe' product.
Even for cameras that are not in color mode in low-light video, most newer units have good dynamic range, whereas these low-power IR LEDs would likely not be able to fully obscure a persons face in the video.
Probably this tint is compensated for in normal light.
I actually was obsessed with IR cameras and mods for some reason around 10-12 years ago. I remember using developed empty photo films to block visible light and let only IR through after removing the IR filter.
High power LEDs in the visible spectrum are terribly bright, and when I accidentally get them shined into the eye, it really feels concerning if any harm has been done.
https://medium.com/@alex.kilpatrick/ir-illumination-and-eye-...
He concludes:
"If you buy the largest IR floodlight available on Amazon and you stare at it 200 mm (~7") from your face for more than 1000 seconds (~ 16 minutes) there is a possibility you might damage your cornea. So don’t do that. And I doubt anyone would do that because these things get pretty hot at that distance."
I wonder if it's possible to make it bright enough to blind regular (non IR filtered) cameras too?
With better noise reduction algorithms, more sensitive sensors and lower noise sensors, IR filters are now almost always used in smart phone cameras.
My guess would be that something bright enough to wash out the red channel would still leave the blue and green intact. So there should be enough information that the image is degraded but not necessarily blinded.
But I could be wrong, depending on how independently the color sensors and processing work.
The tech person had every possible path wired up with Monster video cables. A waste of probably $500!
For your gated community, it seems like a detection for the video feed going haywire that calls the cops might be useful.
How is that state of the art? My phone from 2015 had 21 megapixels[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_X_Play#Hardware
if you can eliminate your movements and shape then you're ahead of the game, otherwise you're identifiable
to which it shows up as a giant flashing sign
https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00025283
you think wearing hoodies is an indication that you are ready to commit violent theft?
I hate society.
"I like to sweat in warm clothes during summer months" isn't a valid reason.