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These Hoodies Make You ‘Invisible’ to Some Surveillance Algorithms
They were created by researchers from Facebook and the University of Maryland
The spread of artificial intelligence into surveillance technology has given every CCTV camera the potential to turn into a spy for the state. And on the internet, images scraped from social media sites or videos can be used to build massive surveillance databases like Clearview AI.
A hoodie might change that.
Researchers from Facebook and the University of Maryland have made a series of sweatshirts and T-shirts that trick surveillance algorithms into not detecting the wearer. They’ve dubbed them “invisibility cloaks” for A.I.
The shirts exploit a quirk that was found in computer vision algorithms nearly five years ago. These algorithms use a simple, even naive approach to identifying objects: They look for patterns of pixels in a new image that resemble patterns they’ve seen before. Humans can use complex clues or real-world knowledge when they’re looking at something new, but algorithms just use pattern matching.
That means if you know the pattern the algorithm is looking for, you can hide it. In order to create the algorithm-fooling shirts, the Facebook and Maryland team ran 10,000 images of people…
