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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Scientists have found another way to deanonymize somebody [marketplace.org]:

Researchers have developed a way that may identify masked terrorists through their hand gestures -- more specifically, from the "V" signs they make when posing for photos or videos.

A group of scientists at Mu'tah University in Jordan recently published a report on the study, which used an artificial intelligence algorithm and biometrics to determine the identities of their subjects through these gestures, the MIT Technology Review [technologyreview.com] reported this week.

"Sometimes the only evidence to identify a person is their hand geometry, and not the whole hand -- only two fingers (the index and the middle fingers) while showing the victory sign, as seen in many terrorists videos," the study's abstract [arxiv.org] reads.

The technique's identification accuracy can vary greatly:

We have created a new database in this regard using a mobile phone camera, imaging the victory signs of 50 different persons over two sessions. Simple measurements for the fingers, in addition to the Hu Moments for the areas of the fingers were used to extract the geometric features of the shown part of the hand shown after segmentation. The experimental results using the KNN classifier were encouraging for most of the recorded persons; with about 40% to 93% total identification accuracy, depending on the features, distance metric and K used.

Original Submission