The next challenge for facial recognition is identifying people whose faces are covered
Facial recognition is becoming more and more common, but ask anyone how to avoid it and they’ll say: easy, just wear a mask. In the future, though, that might not be enough. Facial recognition technology is under development that’s capable of identifying someone even if their face is covered up — and it could mean that staying anonymous in public will be harder than ever before.
The topic was raised this week after research published on the preprint server arXiv describing just such a system was shared in a popular AI newsletter. Using deep learning and a dataset of pictures of people wearing various disguises, researchers were able to train a neural network that could potentially identify masked faces with some reliability. Academic…
