This colourful picture is like an invisibility cloak for AI

Invisibility Cloak

The technology behind sophisticated mass surveillance systems have made enormous strides in recent years. You can’t even jaywalk in some parts of the world without an AI-powered camera snitching on you.

New research, though, could throw AI-powered surveillance cameras for a loop. A group of engineers from the university of KU Leuven in Belgium invented a colorful patch you can print out yourself and hang around your neck that renders you invisible to automatic surveillance cameras that use AI-based object recognition software.

A preprint of the research was published last week in arXiv.

The so-called “adversarial patch” was able to hide test subjects from automated surveillance cameras and security systems because of the way the image itself “effectively lowers the accuracy of person detection” — in other words, you become part of the scene and not overwhelmingly one thing, like a “person” or “chair” by introducing a bunch of noise through the patch.

Ugly T-Shirt

It’s not the only adversarial patch of its kind. Dutch artist and designer Simone C. Niquille created a series of t-shirts that are covered in a bunch of bizarre faces that are able to confuse Facebook’s automatic face recognition software.

The Dutch researchers are also hoping their patch could be turned into a t-shirt, making wearers “virtually invisible for automatic surveillance cameras” — at least until the security system’s manufacturers issue software updates.