Researchers Have Come Up With Glasses That Can Fool AI-Powered Facial Recognition

Are you infuriated when Facebook's facial recognition system automatically tags you? Perhaps, wearing a pair of glasses could help.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently conducted a study where they found that specially designed spectacle frames could fool even the best facial-recognition software into thinking that you are not the real person. The glasses can make you disappear to such systems and also trick them into thinking that you are someone else, said a report published on The Verge. Costing just $0.22, the glasses successfully concealed the identity of the wearer in 100 percent of the tests done so far.

The glasses are able to function since they exploit the way by which facial recognition systems understand faces. The software studies huge amounts of information to determine recurring patterns. When it comes to identifying faces, it measures the distance between a person's pupils, for instance, or look at the angle of their eyebrows or nostrils.

However, this analysis occurs at an abstract level compared to the way humans are able to comprehend. The software fails to understand faces in the way humans do since they simply watch out for pixels or patterns. If you are able to know what type of patterns the machine is looking for, you can trick it into seeing animals or objects too. This is what the researchers exactly worked on.

That said, the system has some amount of limitations. For example, instead of acting like a mask, the glasses are a subtle disguise. Then comes the problem of the way the image is taken and its location since the researchers didn't test how the glasses work at varying distances or under different lighting conditions. Furthermore, the idea of wearing these glasses to parties and events just to be avoided getting tagged by Facebook's huge facial recognition database does not make sense at all.