Special baseball cap is invented to trick facial recognition systems

A newly invented baseball cap that is equipped with laser dots, can fool facial recognition systems like Apple's Face ID into thinking that you are someone else. The inside of the cap features tiny LED lights. When the cap is worn, the lights project dots that cannot be seen by the human eye. However, facial recognition systems know that they are there; with the dots appearing in strategic locations, Face ID and other similar unlocking and verification tools are fooled. This process is called "adversarial learning."

The LED lights can be placed under a person's real hair, under a wig, or even hidden under an umbrella. Those familiar with the technology say that it can be used to "dodge surveillance cameras" and "impersonate" unsuspecting victims. Using the cap, facial-recognition system FaceNet incorrectly identified random individuals as famous celebrities, including musician Moby, 70% of the time.

The tiny dots projected on the faces of those wearing the cap play havoc with the mapping technology used on facial recognition systems. The cap was devised by researchers at Fudan University in China, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Indiana University, and Alibaba Inc.


Check out the image at the top of this story. The "attacker" is the person wearing the cap. The "victim" is the person that the attacker is trying to impersonate. The distance measures similarities between the image of the attacker and the victim and is measured before and after the infrared dots are tuned. In all four cases cited, tuning up the dots enabled the attacker to look more like the person he was impersonating, to a facial recognition system.

source: Mashable