Using AI to identify protestors hiding behind hats or scarves is entirely possible

Artificial intelligence is giving rise to unprecedented capabilities for surveillance, from facial recognition at bridge crossings to the ability to identify thousands of people at once. Now, new research suggests that AI could potentially be used to identify people who have taken steps to conceal their identities by wearing hats, sunglasses, or scarves over their faces. The paper, accepted to appear in a computer vision conference workshop next month and detailed in Jack Clark's ImportAI newsletter, shows that identifying people covering their faces is possible, but there's a long way to go before it's accurate enough to be relied upon. Researchers used a deep-learning algorithm--a flavor of artificial intelligence that detects patterns within massive amounts of data--to find specific points on a person's face and analyze the distance between those points. When asked to compare a face concealed by a hat or scarf against photos of five people, the algorithm was able to correctly identify the person 56% of the time.