Facebook AI Can Now Alter Videos to 'Hide' People From Facial Recognition (venturebeat.com) 16
Facebook AI Research created a system for the de-identification of individuals in videos, reports VentureBeat:
It maps a slightly distorted version on a person's face in order to make it difficult for facial recognition technology to identify a person... Like faceswap deepfake software, the AI uses an encoder-decoder architecture to generate both a mask and an image. During training, the person's face is distorted then fed into the network. Then the system generates distorted and undistorted images of a person's face for output that can be embedded into video.
Facebook has no plan to apply the tech to any part of the Facebook family of apps at this time, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat, but such methods could enable public speech that remains recognizable to people but not to AI systems. Anonymized faces in videos could also be used for the privacy-conscious training of AI systems.
Facebook has no plan to apply the tech to any part of the Facebook family of apps at this time, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat, but such methods could enable public speech that remains recognizable to people but not to AI systems. Anonymized faces in videos could also be used for the privacy-conscious training of AI systems.
Frustrated, Incorporated (Score:1)
We could build a factory and make misery
We'll create the cure; we made the disease - Soul Asylum
Oh Facebook, thanks for making this song relevant again.
Re: Frustrated, Incorporated (Score:1)
Check out our new FTFY (tm) feature: we will now make you out of focus in your very own videos!
The good censor (Score:2)
So people cant see the frail, coughing political leader try and give a speech?
Selective moderation of content (Score:2)
They built it but won't implement it for general availability, that is basically doublespeak for "we will use it when we feel it necessary". Politician in a place that isn't beneficial to the narrative - filter him out so no automated system can ever find him.
The tech isn't hard, we've had facial recognition, applying a filter on the "green box" isn't hard to do. The fact that they want to use it in Stalinist methods to disappear disgraced members of the party is more of a concern.
Re: (Score:2)
So even if they use it liberally, it is only concealing identities from the public, and not concealing them from governments, or from big data institutions.
Re: Selective moderation of content (Score:2)
... or consider it as a kind of encryption: as easy to decrypt as to encrypt when one has the key, not at all when one hasn't.
Re: (Score:2)
Also consider.. if the distortions are automated, so too the undistorions can be automated.
That depends on the information loss. If you're just swirling the pixels around that can look visually obfuscated but be "unswirled" by someone finding the exact algorithm and parameters. If you pixelated the image the information would be lost - you can't derive many input values from one average. So if your face is replaced by a generic or randomized mask where one output face could map to hundreds of input faces then there really is no way to invert the process. In any case, I don't tnink it's particular
Re: (Score:2)
It's not even that good. They're just adding a bit of distortion that happens to fool whatever facial recognition system they're using. The faces look pretty much identical to a human, likely would to a system other than the one they specifically chose to fool, and certainly would to any system trained with the distorted faces.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe the doublespeak means "if you request this, we will keep the unmodified footage in a special repository for extra attention from people who do pay us". This is the practice with "unlisted" phone numbers, which do get extra attention and are trackable at various points in the system.
And so (Score:2)
And I'll bet they have a patent on it so no one else can.
Good..... (Score:2)
FB will censor it AFTER they've processed it. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
This. Article title should read:
Facebook ai can now alter videos to hide people from facial recognition*
* on other platforms.