Google recently announced that they are banning facial recognition on Google Glass until privacy protection is in place, of course that doesn’t mean that Google Glass will not get facial recognition some time in the future.
Now a privacy visor has been developed that could potentially be used to block facial recognition on Google Glass and other systems. The Privacy Visor was developed by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, have a look at the video below.
“You can try wearing sunglasses. But sunglasses alone can’t prevent face detection. Because face detection uses features like the eyes and nose, it’s hard to prevent just by concealing your eyes. This is the privacy visor I have developed, which uses 11 near-infrared LEDs. I’m switching it on now. It prevents face detection, like this.”
“Light from these near-infrared LEDs can’t be seen by the human eye, but when it passes through a camera’s imaging device, it appears bright. The LEDs are installed in these locations because, a feature of face detection is, the eyes and part of the nose appear dark, while another part of the nose appears bright. So, by placing light sources mostly near dark parts of the face, we’ve succeeded in canceling face detection characteristics, making face detection fail.”
Source DigInfoTV