Defeating Big Brother with Glasses: An Attack on Facial Recognition Neural Networks

As deep learning techniques continue to advance, image recognition systems are becoming more and more powerful. With this power comes great reward -- helping diagnose disease from x-rays and self-driving cars are just two examples. But there is also potential for harm, particularly concerning facial recognition. In the future, it's possible that surveillance cameras with state-of-the-art facial recognition technology could pop up on every street corner, effectively eliminating any privacy we still have. Fortunately, some researchers are already coming up with ways to counteract deep learning based facial recognition. I would like to highlight one interesting method -- using an adversarial attack in the form of specially colored glasses to confuse facial recognition algorithms.