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RandomFactor writes:

The Reg has a story up about an article [PDF] published Thursday, in which researchers show off a 15 inch (40cm) square placard with a pattern that shows a high degree of effectiveness in confounding automated person-detection by surveillance cameras.

"The idea behind this work is to be able to circumvent security systems that use a person detector to generate an alarm when a person enters the view of a camera," explained Wiebe Van Ranst, a PhD researcher at KU Leuven, in an email to The Register. "Our idea is to generate an occlusion pattern that can be worn by a possible intruder to conceal the intruder from for the detector."

The technique is demonstrated in this video with the album cover sized placard centered on the body being passed between two people who disappear from recognition as it is centered on their bodies.

Looking ahead, the researchers hope to generalize their work to other neural network architectures like Faster R-CNN. They believe that they will be able turn their pattern into a T-shirt print that will make people "virtually invisible" to object-detection algorithms in automatic surveillance cameras.

Clothing such as they describe could be combined with related efforts like CV Dazzle fashion styling which is designed to confuse facial recognition software, making privacy in the future very strange looking indeed.

Original Submission