Psychedelic toasters fool image tech

A team of Google researchers has created psychedelic stickers that can fool image recognition software into seeing objects that are not there. Using a toaster as an example, the team produced colourful computer-generated patterns by sampling hundreds of photographs of the appliance. When the patterns were put next to another item, such as a banana, many neural networks saw a toaster instead. The team said the method could be used to "attack" image recognition systems. "These adversarial patches can be printed, added to any scene, photographed, and presented to image classifiers," the researchers said.