One interesting thing I've read is that eyebrows may be more important for face recognition (by humans) than the appearance of the eyes themselves. (I suspect this has more to do with the shape of the brow bone than the eyebrow hair.)
The one system I read about in passing, which was surprisingly accurate, just looked for off-color blots to the bottom, left and right of a supposed face. If you're not blonde, eyebrows probably contribute more to the blot than the pupils.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso
I wonder where all those artists get their knowledge about computers from. Whoever thinks that computer can only give you answers, and only do what they are told to---has never debugged.
Well, have you debugged? I've done so thousands of times, and invariably the cause was that the computer was doing exactly what I told it to do, but not what I thought I was telling it to do.
Cameras can't see the difference between visible light and infrared, so one thing you could do would be to put a bunch of lnfrared leds on your face - humans can't see it, but to the cameras your head looks like a light bulb.
"Putting paint on your face isn't always practical," he said. "This is just the way that I wanted to test this. But if you wanted to be covert, you could try wearing different styles of make-up or accessories. You could position a Band-aid on the right spot on your face. The power of this idea is that people can interpret it in their own way."
What's interesting is that Dazzle camo is typically used to confuse the visual systems of human beings, not computer vision, but some of the principles and tricks seem to be the same.
"Harvey said he got his idea from studying camouflage methods use during World War I and World War II. His project, CV Dazzle, is based on the original dazzle camouflage used by the military to hide ships in the 1940s."
There's never been a better time to be a creepy stalker.
Back in the beginning when Facebook wasn't stalker friendly I remember wanting to have auto tagging based on facial recognition. Now... now I'm afraid that I'll get tagged by other people in facebook (even though I'm not part of it anymore) and facebook will of course make money by selling all the facial patterns to third parties.
The applications of facial recognition make my mind fly, they remind me of Minority Report and marketers recognizing you wherever you go, it makes me think of even more divorces based on far more evidence that will be automatically available on social networks.
I think I'll start wearing some make-up a few months from now, or turn my face away every time I see a camera. The end of anonymity is near.
If you're really concerned, the solution is simple. Don't tell your friends the same name that you tell the government. If a bunch of people tag you as "John Smith" on Facebook, and "Bill Smitthers" is the person that is behind on his back taxes, face recognition with data bought from Facebook is not going to find you.
True—your name is whatever you get people to call you, legally, at least in some states—but the very important caveat is that if you change your name or use an alias for purposes of fraud, either to defraud someone else or to defraud the gov't, that's still illegal. So for instance, it's perfectly legal for me to write my name as "Don" even though my SS card says "Donald", but then, I'm writing my actual SS# on my taxes (and paying them!), so there's no fraud.
Replying late. In Italy, or Albania, your name is registered after your gov documents. You can use a "mouth" different name with your friends, but since the register of the class is open and stays always on the room, everyone could read it.
See this example: http://i.imgur.com/ADXtF.png
The research was done by Pawan Sinha at MIT.