It might sound like it’s straight out of a Harry Potter book. The students’ latest invention, which they call “InvisDefense”, has received a lot of attention from the national authorities. Although the garment is not invisible to the naked eye, it does have the potential to hide people from the country’s extensive surveillance culture.
China’s surveillance systems are the most comprehensive in the world. There are cameras on almost every street corner in the big cities and several provinces have introduced their own facial recognition systems to track the activities of both the population and foreigners.
According to Amnesty International, China is a leading developer of surveillance and censorship technology and actively uses this to control its own population at the expense of human rights.
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There is not far between each surveillance camera in the Beijing cityscape. Now Chinese students have reportedly developed a garment that makes them “invisible” to the technology used to identify people from animals and objects. Photo: Greg Baker/AFP
Won a research award
The invention recently won a research competition sponsored by Huawei Technologies, which again has clear links to the Chinese government.
The technology students from Wuhan University had, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), constructed a jacket that uses methods to confuse the artificial intelligence (AI) the cameras use to identify people from animals and objects. The cloak did not make the wearer invisible, but made the artificial intelligence unable to identify them as human.
– Nowadays, many security devices can detect people. Road cameras have pedestrian detection and smart cars have the ability to detect pedestrians, roads and obstacles. Our InvisiDefense makes the cameras detect you, but not that you are a person, says Professor Wang Zeng to SCMP. He was the students’ supervisor during the process.
New camouflage options
During the day, the cloak uses a special camouflage pattern, which confuses the algorithms the cameras use. At night, the artificial-intelligence-controlled cameras use infrared light to identify the heat from people. The cloak’s technology then creates an unusual temperature pattern, which then confuses the cameras and prevents them from identifying the cloak wearer as a human.
– This is the first product in the industry that can avoid human activity being detected and at the same time not attract attention to the naked eye. Through tests on campus, the accuracy of pedestrian detection has been reduced by 57 percent. And that figure could be higher in the future, says Wang.
He believes the tests show that there are still loopholes in artificial intelligence development and that the findings could be important for researchers in the future to improve AI. He points out that the technology can also be used militarily to avoid drones or confrontations between humans and machines on the battlefield.
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