In 2000, I wrote: “If McDonald’s offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block.”
Burger King in Brazil is almost there, offering discounts in exchange for a facial scan. From a marketing video:
“At the end of the year, it’s Friday every day, and the hangover kicks in,” a vaguely robotic voice says as images of cheeseburgers glitch in and out over fake computer code. “BK presents Hangover Whopper, a technology that scans your hangover level and offers a discount on the ideal combo to help combat it.” The stunt runs until January 2nd.
A helpful summary of which US retail stores are using facial recognition, thinking about using it, or currently not planning on using it. (This, of course, can all change without notice.)
Three years ago, I wrote that campaigns to ban facial recognition are too narrow. The problem here is identification, correlation, and then discrimination. There’s no difference whether the identification technology is facial recognition, the MAC address of our phones, gait recognition, license plate recognition, or anything else. Facial recognition is just the easiest technology right now.
Interesting article on technologies that will automatically identify people:
With technology like that on Mr. Leyvand’s head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at a crowded conference. However, six years later, the company now known as Meta has not released a version of that product and Mr. Leyvand has departed for Apple to work on its Vision Pro augmented reality glasses.
The technology is here. Maybe the implementation is still dorky, but that will change. The social implications will be enormous.
Napoleon Gonzalez, of Etna, assumed the identity of his brother in 1965, a quarter century after his sibling’s death as an infant, and used the stolen identity to obtain Social Security benefits under both identities, multiple passports and state identification cards, law enforcement officials said.
[…]
A new investigation was launched in 2020 after facial identification software indicated Gonzalez’s face was on two state identification cards.
The facial recognition technology is used by the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles to ensure no one obtains multiple credentials or credentials under someone else’s name, said Emily Cook, spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office.
Abstract: In this paper we describe how to plant novel types of backdoors in any facial recognition model based on the popular architecture of deep Siamese neural networks, by mathematically changing a small fraction of its weights (i.e., without using any additional training or optimization). These backdoors force the system to err only on specific persons which are preselected by the attacker. For example, we show how such a backdoored system can take any two images of a particular person and decide that they represent different persons (an anonymity attack), or take any two images of a particular pair of persons and decide that they represent the same person (a confusion attack), with almost no effect on the correctness of its decisions for other persons. Uniquely, we show that multiple backdoors can be independently installed by multiple attackers who may not be aware of each other’s existence with almost no interference.
We have experimentally verified the attacks on a FaceNet-based facial recognition system, which achieves SOTA accuracy on the standard LFW dataset of 99.35%. When we tried to individually anonymize ten celebrities, the network failed to recognize two of their images as being the same person in 96.97% to 98.29% of the time. When we tried to confuse between the extremely different looking Morgan Freeman and Scarlett Johansson, for example, their images were declared to be the same person in 91.51% of the time. For each type of backdoor, we sequentially installed multiple backdoors with minimal effect on the performance of each one (for example, anonymizing all ten celebrities on the same model reduced the success rate for each celebrity by no more than 0.91%). In all of our experiments, the benign accuracy of the network on other persons was degraded by no more than 0.48% (and in most cases, it remained above 99.30%).
It’s a weird attack. On the one hand, the attacker has access to the internals of the facial recognition system. On the other hand, this is a novel attack in that it manipulates internal weights to achieve a specific outcome. Given that we have no idea how those weights work, it’s an important result.
Abstract: Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved stunning realism, fooling even human observers. Indeed, the popular tongue-in-cheek website http://thispersondoesnotexist.com, taunts users with GAN generated images that seem too real to believe. On the other hand, GANs do leak information about their training data, as evidenced by membership attacks recently demonstrated in the literature. In this work, we challenge the assumption that GAN faces really are novel creations, by constructing a successful membership attack of a new kind. Unlike previous works, our attack can accurately discern samples sharing the same identity as training samples without being the same samples. We demonstrate the interest of our attack across several popular face datasets and GAN training procedures. Notably, we show that even in the presence of significant dataset diversity, an over represented person can pose a privacy concern.
Abstract: A master face is a face image that passes face-based identity-authentication for a large portion of the population. These faces can be used to impersonate, with a high probability of success, any user, without having access to any user-information. We optimize these faces, by using an evolutionary algorithm in the latent embedding space of the StyleGAN face generator. Multiple evolutionary strategies are compared, and we propose a novel approach that employs a neural network in order to direct the search in the direction of promising samples, without adding fitness evaluations. The results we present demonstrate that it is possible to obtain a high coverage of the population (over 40%) with less than 10 master faces, for three leading deep face recognition systems.
It’s hard to comprehend how far machine learning has come in the past few years. You can now use a sub-£50 computer to reliably recognise someone’s face with surprising accuracy.
Although this kind of computing power is normally out of reach of microcontrollers, adding a Raspberry Pi computer to your project with the new High Quality Camera opens up a range of possibilities. From simple alerting applications (‘Mum’s arrived home!’), to dynamically adjusting settings based on the person using the project, there’s a lot of fun to be had.
Here’s a beginner’s guide to getting face recognition up and running.
Face recognition using machine learning is hard work, so the latest, greatest Raspberry Pi 4 is a must
1. Prepare your Raspberry Pi For face recognition to work well, we’re going to need some horsepower, so we recommend a minimum of Raspberry Pi 3B+, ideally a Raspberry Pi 4. The extra memory will make all the difference. To keep as much resource as possible available for our project, we’ve gone for a Raspberry Pi OS Lite installation with no desktop.
Make sure you’re on the network, have set a new password, enabled SSH if you need to, and updated everything with sudo apt -y update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade. Finally, go into settings by running sudo raspi-config and enable the camera in ‘Interfacing Options’.
2. Attach the camera This project will work well with the original Raspberry Pi Camera, but the new official HQ Camera will give you much better results. Be sure to connect the camera to your Raspberry Pi 4 with the power off. Connect the ribbon cable as instructed in hsmag.cc/HQCameraGetStarted. Once installed, boot up your Raspberry Pi 4 and test the camera is working. From the command line, run the following: raspivid -o test.h264 -t 10000 This will record ten seconds of video to your microSD card. If you have an HDMI cable plugged in, you’ll see what the camera can see in real-time. Take some time to make sure the focus is correct before proceeding.
3. Install dependencies The facial recognition library we are using is one that has been maintained for many years by Adam Geitgey. It contains many examples, including Python 3 bindings to make it really simple to build your own facial recognition applications. What is not so easy is the number of dependencies that need to be installed first. There are way too many to list here, and you probably won’t want to type them out, so head over to hsmag.cc/FacialRec so that you can cut and paste the commands. This step will take a while to complete on a Raspberry Pi 4, and significantly longer on a Model 3 or earlier.
3. Install the libraries Now that we have everything in place, we can install Adam’s applications and Python bindings with a simple, single command: sudo pip3 install face_recognition Once installed, there are some examples we can download to try everything out. cd git clone --single-branch https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition.git In this repository is a range of examples showing the different ways the software can be used, including live video recognition. Feel free to explore and remix.
5. Example images The examples come with a training image of Barack Obama. To run the example: cd ./face_recognition/examples python3 facerec_on_raspberry_pi.py On your smartphone, find an image of Obama using your favourite search engine and point it at the camera. Providing focus and light are good you will see: “I see someone named Barack Obama!” If you see a message saying it can’t recognise the face, then try a different image or try to improve the lighting if you can. Also, check the focus for the camera and make sure the distance between the image and camera is correct.
Who are you? What even is a name? Can a computer decide your identity?
6. Training time The final step is to start recognising your own faces. Create a directory and, in it, place some good-quality passport-style photos of yourself or those you want to recognise. You can then edit the facerec_on_raspberry_pi.py script to use those files instead. You’ve now got a robust prototype of face recognition. This is just the beginning. These libraries can also identify ‘generic’ faces, meaning it can detect whether a person is there or not, and identify features such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. There’s a world of possibilities available, starting with these simple scripts. Have fun!
Issue 38 of Hackspace Magazine is out NOW
Each month, HackSpace magazine brings you the best projects, tips, tricks and tutorials from the makersphere. You can get it from the Raspberry Pi Press online store, The Raspberry Pi store in Cambridge, or your local newsagents.
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.
