AI Will Soon Identify Protesters With Their Faces Partly Concealed - Motherboard

Protesters regularly wear disguises like bandanas and sunglasses to prevent being identified, either by law enforcement or internet sleuths. Their efforts may be no match for artificial intelligence, however. A new paper to be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW) introduces a deep-learning algorithm--a subset of machine learning used to detect and model patterns in large heaps of data--that 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 deep-learning algorithm works in a novel way.