Makeup That Hides You From The All-Seeing Eye Of The CCTV Cameras

In big cities and other densely populated areas there is no place, that is not being watched by a CCTV camera. Police cameras and private video surveillance along the streets and at the squares, in big shopping malls and restaurants. And soon, Google Glass will be released and in that case, you can end up watched by a couple of cameras simultaneously. So, soon your every step may be recorded, processed and analyzed. Also, if you'll add to this new facial recognition technologies, you will be shocked by the tracking opportunities the government will have.

Every action creates reaction and that is why people try to protect themselves, from the growing government tracking risks. So that's why there is a huge variety of technologies, that may help to protect yourself from the “all-seeing eye” has appeared on the Internet recently.

Tracking people

We should mention that such projects was first a reaction to a usage of UAVs for tracking people over the USA, but now they've became even more popular. We'd like to tell about Isao Echizen, Tokio university professor and Seiichi Gauci, a professor at Tokyo University of Technology Kogakuin. They offer to use special glasses, mounted with bright IR LEDs. The light of those LEDs can not be seen with a bare eye, but most of the video surveillance cameras really sensitive to the IR light. Those simple LEDs make facial recognition impossible and may even block camera's ability to “see” your face. The prototype, that was shown by those Japanese scientists looks pretty strange, but using smaller LEDs, built in the glasses' rim will make them look just like the ordinary ones.

Another anti-surveillance project belongs to a German designer and artist, Martin Backes, and is called “Pixelhead”. It is a balaclava, that is crafted with a pixelised head pattern. Though that project has no technological importance, it still have a symbolic and political value. The base of the pattern is the picture of Hans-Peter Frederick, German minister, that is widely known for his paranoiac attitude to the freedom of the Internet and tries to expand the powers of the government for tracking people.

But, as we at jammer-store suppose, the most interesting project belongs to Adam Harvey and it is called “CV Dazzle”. Using an OpenCV library and a couple of simple Java scripts, he has developped a couple of hairstyles and makeups that make facial recognition impossible. He used sharp, contrast lines and spots, that block the work of facial recognition algorithms.

Usage in military

The result looks rather extravagant, but it won't look really surprising in big cities and if it may be illegal to wear a mask, that covers all your face in public places, but police won't have any questions to people with such makeups of hairstyles.

Adam Harvey has borrowed the idea from the military. The same contrast camouflage was used during the First World War – those wide black and white stripes were literary “breaking” the silhouettes of the military ships and made it hard for the enemy to determine the type, size and even the course of the ship.

The photos of the models with a CV Dazzle makeups are not recognized by the most of the popular facial recognition algorithms. So maybe, that will become an ultimate anti video surveillance method, like spy camera jammers of even CCTV blockers. Also, they look pretty.