20160914 Verpixelte Gesichter sind wiedererkennbar

14.09.2016 Verpixelte Gesichter sind wiedererkennbar

AI Can Recognize Your Face Even If You’re Pixelated

Pixelation has long been a familiar fig leaf to cover our visual media’s most private parts. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Tech say that they’ve trained a piece of software that can undermine the privacy benefits of standard content-masking techniques like blurring and pixelation by learning to read or see what’s meant to be hidden in images—anything from a blurred house number to a pixelated human face in the background of a photo.

Additionally, more powerful object and facial recognition techniques already exist that could potentially go even further in defeating methods of visual redaction. The researchers were able to defeat three privacy protection technologies, starting with YouTube’s proprietary blur tool. To execute the attacks, the team trained neural networks to perform image recognition by feeding them data from four large and well-known image sets for analysis.