Defeating Facial Recognition with Makeup

By carefully applying off-the-shelf makeup to distort the heatmap used by facial recognition systems to identify black-listed people, the systems can be defeated. The trick is each person's heatmap is slightly different, so the makeup pattern must be designed uniquely to each individual. The makeup job looks just like normal makeup so it doesn't get noticed by the human observers either.

“​​I was surprised by the results of this study,” Nitzan Guettan, a doctoral student and lead author of the study, told Motherboard. “[The makeup artist] didn't do too much tricks, just see the makeup in the image and then she tried to copy it into the physical world. It's not a perfect copy there. There are differences but it still worked.”