One of the hundreds (thousands?) of uses of the Artificial intelligence is that of identification through video cameras. But scientists from the University of Maryland, with the support of Facebook AI, created a sweater that makes a person “invisible” against this technology. How does it work?
This “invisibility cloak,” as the researchers explain, uses data and patterns that suppress objectivity scores produced by detectors.
With the sweater, the user will be imperceptible to Artificial Intelligence.
Scientists created a pattern trained on the COCO dataset, with the goal of avoiding the YOLOv2 detector.
Let us remember that Artificial Intelligence is the attempt to recreate human intelligence in machines or computers, based on machine learning and deep learning. In this case, with algorithms and identification data, YOLOv2 scans and recognizes people.
How does the sweater work that makes the person “invisible” in front of Artificial Intelligence?
The group of researchers at the University of Maryland uploaded images from the COCO detection dataset, passing them through a detector.
“The detectors,” according to the Maryland scientists, “They work by considering thousands of ‘priors’ (potential bounding boxes) within the image with different locations, sizes and aspect ratios. To fool an object detector, an adversarial example must fool all previous ones in the image, which is much more difficult than fooling the single output of a classifier.”
When a person is identified, a pattern is rendered on the test subject with random distortions of perspective, brightness, and contrast.
Later, scientists used a gradient descent algorithm, finding the pattern that minimizes the “objectness scores” (that is, confidence in the presence of an object) for each object above.
The sweater, with a microfleece lining, uses patterns that cannot be identified by Artificial Intelligence, in this case YOLOv2’s.
Will the “invisibility” jumper go on sale?
At the moment, the “invisibility” sweater against Artificial Intelligence is still under development and improvement. It has not been announced if it will go on sale commercially, but it is still an interesting element in today’s world.