‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?

And it's only upwards of seven hundred dollars for a hoodie

Agree, its just a sales pitch.

My first thought when I saw this - "oh hey look, razzle dazzle clothes" which is my personal mental association of the famous scene in Stripes movie, with Dazzle Camouflage which I always thought was a neat idea.

In late May 2026 images appeared on social media showing Russian Ural and KAMAZ trucks painted in the classic dazzle camouflage. Supposedly the unusual paint scheme is to confuse Ukrainian drones controlled by artificial intelligence and disrupt their pattern recognition, and not to trick the human eye. Ukraine has experimented with AI for targeting as seen in Operation Spiderweb, and is conducting a deep strike campaign to disrupt Russian logistics.[72][73]

Untested means, unlikely to work at all.

Maybe the IR LEDs at night.

Translation is they don't work.

Thing is, I feel like having bright dazzling lights on your hoodie just fingerprints you even more, no?

Maybe if you use it strategically it could help, but I wouldn’t be sold on that feature

They don't have a lot of technical details but essentially what these do is try to look maximally like 'eyes' or whatever other targets are used by facial recognition to some AI model.

They have to choose which model(s) to train against and there is no guarantee that the same output would fool a differently trained model.

The IR LED dazzlers should work against anything that is using IR as they work by overloading the sensor. The issue is that most cameras are not using IR in most conditions and will switch to visible wavelengths with enough light.

You could technically do the same thing with visible lights, but you're going to annoy people if you're walking around in a hoodie ringed with 1,000 lumen LEDs.

just from my reading of papers, optimized patterns make use of the fact that detectors (even modern transformer based architectures) are capital S Sensitive to the sillouette of an object.

in my other comment i linked a paper where they fool modern detectors with 80+% success rate. the clothing looks like a tiedye shirt to me. not fashionable, but not drawing attention either. if there is a way that you can make this fashionable is not a question i can answer :p

from my reading combining detectors (ensembling) does not help. this leaves spies with a problem, how to detect these noisy people without losing performance on normal nonnoisy people. there are tricks to this, but they are limited at best, for the same reason the noise worked in the first place. here is the reason.

assume noise makers create noise with methods A,B,C. you train on a dataset with images from the different noise makers (you don't know which method they used). each of these noisy groups will have a distict sillouette you can detect, but together, you are building a function like:

pineapple: fruit bannana: fruit apple: fruit

this is a solvable problem for ml, so how do the noise makers win ultimately? randomization in the process. if each noise is distinct there is no training, you only have one image per type of fruit, you might as well use traditional CV to detect these noisy people (good luck).

My opinion is i want a product where the customer provides a random seed which generates the process of noise generation for their shirt. the product is the transparency into how the seed effected the noise making, and an evaluation of the noise on modern off the shelf detectors.

obviously we don't see that here, but it seems doable, maybe a business idea for me? haha

Where does one get some schematics to build theses things in minecraft

Fremen ramblings about walking the dunes, here. On gait hiding

Throw a pebble in your shoe to change your walk. Wear a smaller or bigger shoe on one foot. Wear knee and ankle braces on one leg....

There are easy ways to change your gait for an outing.

Fortunately gait biometrics are junk science anyway lol

Get someone to kick you in the leg hard every few days to change your limp.

Did you just figure out an infinite money glitch?

that's just being a politician with extra steps

Last time they were in the media, I found their web site. That ugly sweater cost over a hundred Euro (don't remember if it was two or seven, but at that point it no longer matters).

I'm hoping for such patterns to become open source (and less hard on human eyes).

Those glasses with an attached nose and moustache work also well

Fursuit.

Not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc

Oh, what about the ones with gangsta Bugs Bunny / SpongeBob / Tweety Bird. Memba?

What do you think in it well do? Daytime nothing at all. Night not sure. And only if they have IR lights on the cameras which is becoming less and less needed. I have cameras at home they ambient light is enough and some still have colour. And that is me purchasing inches pass cameras.

@Batman Love this. Different layer of the same fight — theirs is fooling the
camera, mine's on the machine itself. I built Blacklight to surface the
records Windows keeps about you locally (device ID, app-launch history)
and let you clear them. Adversarial clothing for your OS, basically.
Same instinct: see what's watching, then push back. #privacy #foss