thing is, when you walk around on the street looking like the people on their website you don't actually need surveillance camera's because every single person will remember seeing you.

It's meant to make you hard to recognise by machines. People are fine.

At the very least, this could justify weird fashions in cyberpunk and other dystopian settings.

Looking through the pictures I was thinking, there's parts of the world where people just dress that way.

I feel like if the facial recognition systems are that good, it means if I can recognize a face, then so can it

I don't think that's true. I'm no expert on facial recognition, but I believe those systems look at more specific details, like the corners of your eyes and mouth, and where they are relative to your jawline. They're less interested in things like "could this be part of a cheek? does that hair cover a head? does the picture as a whole make sense?". They're very precise (more than we are) at measuring the exact locations of specific features, but less good at checking if the picture as a whole could be hiding a person.

So they're better than us at some things, but can still fail dramatically at things that seem trivial to us.

It's certainly not a way to stay stealthy, yeah. And frankly it's probably worse at defeating face recognition than wearing a bulky hoody and staring at your shoes while you walk. I don't think this will be identity-concealing except maybe at some cybergoth raves...

It's an awfully cool project, though; both artistic and a transformation-resilient adversarial input.

The intersection of high fashion, cutting-edge technology, political commentary, and the eternal war for human rights is an incredible thing.

Does anyone know of any other such projects in the same vein?

As Randall Monroe illustrates here: https://xkcd.com/1105/

I guess the solution could eventually be digital paint which rapidly and randomly alters itself, something akin to the scramble suits from A Scanner Darkly. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrvzb

That CV Dazzle project is fascinating. The link to the warship Dazzle camouflage is also hilarious in the sense that that is what people have to turn to in 2019.

It reminds me of the comic book The Private Eye by Brian K Vaughn. In that story the cloud "bursts" and online privacy evaporates overnight so everyone turns to intense camouflage to protect their identity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Eye)

Does face detection today use the same kind of trained neural nets that YoLo or others use? Watching this video [0] from their site it seems it's using a much more static algorithm trying to detect particular features which is what the CV Dazzle makeup aims to disrupt. As far as I understand one of the benefits of the neural net models is that they're less reliant on defined features than the older CV models.

[0] https://vimeo.com/12774628

On the website it talks about openCV and how to fool that, as well as the general techniques used. I still think from the tips shown that it would be very effective today. For exaple, it talks about how the most distinct features of a face are the nose and eyes, and that hiding or obscuring them works well.

Newer technology likely gets much better at spotting noses and eyes, but taking them entirely out of the picture probably helps. Also the asymmetry I can imagine helps a lot.

This style retcons all those cyberpunk fashion accessories beautifully.

CV Dazzle is perfect for the cyberpunk future that will never happen.