Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the terrapins-tortoises-and-turtles...-oh-my! dept.

MIT researchers have fooled a Google image classification algorithm into thinking that a turtle is a rifle and a baseball is an espresso:

The team built on a concept known as an "adversarial image". That's a picture created from the ground-up to fool an AI into classifying it as something completely different from what it shows: for instance, a picture of a tabby cat recognised with 99% certainty as a bowl of guacamole.

Such tricks work by carefully adding visual noise to the image so that the bundle of signifiers an AI uses to recognise its contents get confused, while a human doesn't notice any difference.

But while there's a lot of theoretical work demonstrating the attacks are possible, physical demonstrations of the same technique are thin on the ground. Often, simply rotating the image, messing with the colour balance, or cropping it slightly, can be enough to ruin the trick.

The MIT researchers have pushed the idea further than ever before, by manipulating not a simple 2D image, but the surface texture of a 3D-printed turtle. The resulting shell pattern looks trippy, but still completely recognisable as a turtle – unless you are Google's public object detection AI, in which case you are 90% certain it's a rifle.

The researchers also 3D printed a baseball with pattering to make it appear to the AI like an espresso, with marginally less success – the AI was able to tell it was a baseball occasionally, though still wrongly suggested espresso most of the time.

The researchers had access to the algorithm, making the task significantly easier.

Also at The Verge.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:03PM (3 children)

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:03PM (#592181)

    In principle, this is obvious - a 3D printer can reproduce to the resolution limit exactly (almost!) what a model describes.

    Image recognition has the major problem that wetware (us) doesn't have the cognitive processor that allows us to weight many things we "know" against a pattern we are presented with.

    Evolutionarily speaking, the ancestor that did not get "tiger" from the noise in the bushes, probably didn't have offspring...

    The pattern recognition of human is *so* good, often things are seen that aren't there.....

    Seen anyone in the toast recently?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Tara Li on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:14PM

    by Tara Li (6248) on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:14PM (#592186)

    From what I was seeing in the article, it's not just a static photo - the object is printed and colored, and is erroneously recognized from most if not all angles. At least, the turtle is, apparently the baseball doesn't work quite as well.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday November 05 2017, @02:21AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Sunday November 05 2017, @02:21AM (#592353) Homepage
    No, not a static photo.

    You have the right to read the article and view the video before you post again. Chose a more appropriate subject line next time.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday November 06 2017, @03:09AM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Monday November 06 2017, @03:09AM (#592787)

      my point was just that video a load of static frames. They could all be faked and made perfect.

      Sorry for the ambiguity , working on this for a project right now...