In William Gibson’s novel Zero History, a key character dons the ugliest T-shirt in the world – a ridiculous-looking garment that magically renders the wearer invisible to CCTV.
Now, as states across the world deploy artificially intelligent surveillance systems to track, trace and monitor citizens, we may find ourselves wearing ugly T-shirts of our own. Researchers at Northeastern University, MIT and IBM have designed a top printed with a kaleidoscopic patch of colour that renders the wearer undetectable to AI. It’s part of a growing number of “adversarial examples” – physical objects designed to counteract the creep of digital surveillance.
“The adversarial T-shirt works on the neural networks used for object detection,” explains Xue Lin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, and co-author of a recent paper on the subject. Normally, a neural network recognises someone or something in an image, draws a “bounding box” around it, and assigns a label to that object.
By finding the boundary points of a neural network – the thresholds at which it decides whether something is an object or not – Lin and colleagues have been able to work backwards to create a design that can confuse the AI network’s classification and labelling system.
Most Popular
Looking specifically at two object-recognition neural networks commonly used for training purposes – YOLOv2 and Faster R-CNN – the team were able to identify the areas of the body where adding pixel noise could confuse the AI, and in effect turn the wearer invisible.
