AI Recognition Of Concealed Faces

"AI Will Soon Identify Protesters With Their Faces Partly Concealed":

[The deep learning system] can identify an individual even when part of their face is obscured. The system was able to correctly identify a person concealed by a scarf 67 percent of the time when they were photographed against a "complex" background, which better resembles real-world conditions...

The algorithm can still identify those angles even when part of a person's mug is obscured, by disguises including caps, scarves, and glasses... The research has troubling implications for protestors and other dissidents, who often work to make sure they aren't ID'd at protests and other demonstrations by covering their faces with scarves or by wearing sunglasses. "To be honest when I was trying to come up with this method, I was just trying to focus on criminals," Amarjot Singh, one of the researchers behind the paper and a Ph.D student at Cambridge University [said].