Digital Camouflage and AI Detection

Um, the green box is, um, showing that I'm getting detected as a

person. Um, this is the, uh, YOLO algorithm running behind.

And once I'm wearing the T-shirt, I'm

not getting detected anymore as a, as a person.

Mm-hmm.

So I can basically

do like this. It's like a-

... very direct

response by the algorithm.

Mm-hmm.

My name is Simon Weckert. I'm a new media artist based in

Berlin, and mostly I work with, uh, code and electronics.

Mm-hmm.

It's called digital camouflage, yeah, yeah.

But it goes into the direction of adversary fashion.

We also see that, for example, cars, um, have a certain painting

to be invisible against flock cameras, for example, and I kind of do the

same for, um, person detection. Um, so the,

um, adversary pattern, uh, which I create is printed on a, on a

T-shirt, which you can wear, and then once you

are standing in front of an

object detection algorithm, for example, YOLO in my project, you

are getting, um, invisible. I had a pattern, like a random pattern,

and then, um, I started with, um, asking YOLO, "How

much percentage

of a person do you see when

this pattern is, uh, on the person?" And then YOLO reported like, "I see

one hundred percent," or something.

And then what the algorithm, um, the training process basically is doing

is, like, it's changing slowly patterns, colors and shapes,

flip them, rotate them, and so on and so forth, and every time after I did

that, I ask again, "How much percentage do you see now?

How much?" And so on and so forth.

And then s- after a while I realized, okay, basically the confidence

score of the algorithm went away from the category of

the person. In Berlin right now we have the situation

that it's the

first time that they're gonna use AI for camera, um, um, these

camera systems to detect, um,

most of it human behavior. You know, it's one thing that somebody's behind

a camera and watching at you, but now you have an AI, and if it

comes between the question of security and freedom, I always choose freedom,

you know? So