‘Anti-Glass’ specs developed to block face recognition technology

By Trevor Mogg June 24, 2013

In an interview last month, the director of Google Glass’s product management team said that it wouldn’t be launching any face recognition services with its high-tech device “unless we have strong privacy protections in place”, meaning that at some point down the road, the Mountain View company could make it a significant part of Glass.

Privacy advocates worried about how such technology might be used with Google’s specs may be interested to learn that researchers at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan have found a way to prevent face recognition technology from working, and it doesn’t involve pulling a latex mask over your head.

The Tokyo-based team has developed a device – also a pair of specs – that prevents Glass or similar technology from recognizing a face. The specs are fitted with 11 near-infrared LEDs which shine a bright light, confusing cameras looking to locate a face.

“Light from these near infrared LEDs can’t be seen by the human eye, but when it passes through the camera’s imaging device, it appears bright,” explained NII associate professor Isao Echizen.

Understanding that the technology only works with cameras that are sensitive to infrared light, Echizen and his team are now experimenting with reflective materials in an attempt to produce the same result with other face-detecting cameras.

Whether the NII’s work one day results in the formation of two distinct spec-wearing camps – Glass and anti-Glass – remains to be seen, but anyone interested in Echizen’s tech should check out the video below.

As the commercial launch of Google Glass draws ever closer, discussions centering on privacy concerns have become more widespread, drawing the attention of many political bodies around the world.

Last month, a Congressional privacy group sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page requesting information on privacy infringement issues regarding Glass. And just last week officials from six nations sent a joint letter to the Mountain View company setting down a series of questions they want answered about the head-based tech.

[via DigInfo]

Topics

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.