Masks can fool facial recognition systems, but the algorithms are learning fast

Vox Recode – by Rebecca Heilweil

We know that face masks help protect others from Covid-19, and it looks like they also provide some protection against facial recognition technology — for now. A preliminary study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) analyzed how well the technology fared when identifying people wearing face masks. Broadly speaking, the facial recognition algorithms designed before the pandemic struggled to recognize faces behind the masks.

The new government study reveals less about how poorly facial recognition algorithms deal with face masks than they do about how companies are already hard at work building algorithms that can adapt to new situations. The pandemic is showing how face mask adoption might end up making facial recognition technology even more powerful than it was before.

“The good news here is very short-lived,” Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Recode. “This just highlights that there’s a global arms race right now to develop facial recognition software that can track people, even when we are wearing masks.”

The error caused by mask-wearing isn’t too surprising. Anyone who’s tried to unlock their iPhone with Face ID while wearing a mask knows that the technology fails in the new scenario. Facial recognition algorithms are generally trained to identify you based on aspects of your facial geometry, and a face mask hides a huge portion of what the algorithm is trying to analyze, namely your nose and mouth, the NIST researchers explain.

The extent to which face masks can trip up algorithms has been serious enough that, amid the George Floyd protests, the Department of Homeland Security sent out a notice in May warning that “violent adversaries” of law enforcement could take advantage of mask-wearing to avoid being spotted by facial recognition. Of course, protesters themselves were concerned about the exact same surveillance technologies being used to threaten their civil liberties.

Now, the NIST research serves as evidence that masks are a real stumbling block for some facial recognition systems. The non-regulatory agency’s research looked at 89 facial recognition algorithms, including those from Panasonic and Samsung, and analyzed their performance on images of 1 million people. The study used photographs of people that were collected when crossing the United States border as well as images that had been included in applications for immigration benefits. The first group of photos was then “digitally masked,” meaning that artificial shapes in various colors that mimicked masks were superimposed on the images of faces, obscuring the subject’s nose, mouth, and part of their cheeks.

See the pics and read the rest here: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/28/21340674/face-masks-facial-recognition-surveillance-nist