Having been doing face recognition (for eye tracking by the way) since the late 1970s, and having given the ‘inventor’ of CAPTCHA the way to fool character recognition technology (which he later patented and made millions on), people need to know that modern state of the art face recognition is really person recognition. That is actually the goal. So…I did the 4 million railway cars in North America, and the real problem was just recognizing which of the 4 million a particular car was. That was a much easier problem. The post office uses address recognition because they have a database of all the addresses it could be, and they just need to figure out which one.
For figuring out people you can use lots of cues including gate, where they are, where they were, how tall they are, and lots and lots of other clues. Indeed, for the railway recognition problem we took over 10,000 measurments on a single car when we knew which one it was, and then we could recognize the car no matter the rain/wind/ or snow coverings, etc. Same for recognizing people. State of the art is to recognize all the 10,000 people in 10,000 demonstrators in a plaza. Machines have been built to do that problem.
Fooling such systems is pretty easy some of the time. Of course, if you have limited the access paths so you can isolate lots of views of the person (e.g., going through security) then you have lots and lots and lots of measurments on him or her, or it (remember those bags you carry? or your shoes? etc.). Fooling face recognition is fun, I guess, for some stupid reason, but I do not understand how people can be so stupid to think it has anything to do with the bad guys. Indeed, you should want really good face recognition to protect your identity when you are controlling the outcome, like using face recognition to log into a computer. As I detail in my book “How to get your privacy back” (on Amazon), often what you think will hurt your privacy is the very thing you need to use to regain it from the people who are taking it.
More fun that might be useful is to pretend to be someone you are not, who you know might actually be where you are. Faking Donald Trump is bad, but somebody you know, might be good. Watch Saturday Night Live for really good pantomime to see what puts the fear of failure in people like me. As a kind of secret, like CAPTCHA was, join in a cool dance through security (in and out) and trade wigs and clothes. That’ll mess’m up.
