[Sportschosun Jang Jong-ho] A shirt that looks overly flashy and bizarre to the human eye, but is instead recognized by artificial intelligence (AI) as something that is not a person, has become a hot topic.
It is "Digital Camouflage," created by German digital artist and designer Simon Weckert to interfere with AI-based surveillance systems' ability to identify people.
According to overseas design and technology outlets such as Futurism, the shirt Weckert unveiled is a complex mix of vivid shapes and patterns in pink, orange, green, and other striking colors. Its exaggerated colors and patterns make it stand out at a glance, even more so than a flashy Hawaiian shirt.
But the design was not made simply to attract attention. It was intentionally created to exploit weaknesses in the way AI-based computer vision systems recognize people.
In an interview with design outlet Dezeen, Weckert explained that AI systems do not actually understand what a human is. Instead, they statistically learn what humans look like from millions of training images.
He said AI identifies people by combining visual features such as the shape of the head and shoulders, the proportions of the torso and limbs, and the outline of the body. Weckert saw this as a potential weakness.
The intricate patterns on his shirt were designed to prevent the human body outline from being read as a single shape. The vivid color shifts and overlapping forms are meant to confuse the process by which AI links separate body parts into one "person."
In a demonstration Weckert released, other pedestrians around the person wearing the shirt were marked with a "PERSON" label, while the wearer did not receive a stable person-recognition label.
However, this should not be interpreted as clothing that makes someone completely invisible to AI surveillance cameras. Weckert himself does not claim that his project can disable the surveillance systems of any particular government or police force.
The demonstration he shared used YOLO, an open-source object detection system, rather than a surveillance network from a specific country. As a result, the outcome can vary depending on lighting, camera angle, distance from the camera, video quality, and the AI model used. Weckert's official project page also states that the shirt does not guarantee anonymity across all surveillance systems.
What is interesting is that AI was also used in the process of creating the shirt's pattern. Weckert developed the design using an "adversarial loop" method. He generated a new pattern, fed it into an AI object-detection model, checked how well it recognized a person, and then revised the pattern repeatedly.
In the end, he used AI to find a way to confuse AI.
Jang Jong-ho, bellho@sportschosun.com
This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.
