In plain words: Shining carefully shaped infrared light on a face tricks face recognition into seeing someone else, while the light stays invisible to people nearby. On a large photo collection, the team found a working light pattern for over 70% of attempts.
Abstract · Invisible Mask: Practical Attacks on Face Recognition with Infrared
Accurate face recognition techniques make a series of critical applications possible: policemen could employ it to retrieve criminals' faces from surveillance video streams; cross boarder travelers could pass a face authentication inspection line without the involvement of officers. Nonetheless, when public security heavily relies on such intelligent systems, the designers should deliberately consider the emerging attacks aiming at misleading those systems employing face recognition. We propose a kind of brand new attack against face recognition systems, which is realized by illuminating the subject using infrared according to the adversarial examples worked out by our algorithm, thus face recognition systems can be bypassed or misled while simultaneously the infrared perturbations cannot be observed by raw eyes. Through launching this kind of attack, an attacker not only can dodge surveillance cameras. More importantly, he can impersonate his target victim and pass the face authentication system, if only the victim's photo is acquired by the attacker. Again, the attack is totally unobservable by nearby people, because not only the light is invisible, but also the device we made to launch the attack is small enough. According to our study on a large dataset, attackers have a very high success rate with a over 70\% success rate for finding such an adversarial example that can be implemented by infrared. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first one to shed light on the severity of threat resulted from infrared adversarial examples against face recognition.
Zhe Zhou, Di Tang, Xiaofeng Wang, Weili Han, Xiangyu Liu, Kehuan Zhang
arXiv:1803.04683 · cs.CR · submitted Mar 13, 2018
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However, a similar fashion accessory does an even better job: some fashion hats have blinky LEDs on them; blinky LEDs cause a camera's components to adjustment for the unusually bright light, which are then gone, than back again. The mechanism in most security cameras cannot adjust for the lighting changes as fast as the LEDs are blinking, causing no good captures of the face beneath the blinkly LEDs.