- [Matt] You may not be easily fooled
but a recent study showed that a third of people
couldn't tell at a glance which of these are masks.
Sure, they go by really fast but when many people
were given unlimited time, they still couldn't tell.
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- When they're given as long as they like,
they're having a really hard time
and giving us the wrong answer
to this seemingly simple question
on about one in five trials.
- [Matt] We've all seen masks like these
in movies like "Mission: Impossible"
but they have made it out of Hollywood
and are being used to fool people in real life
and even commit crimes,
like this masked bank robber in California.
- The police were looking for someone
of a particular description,
and it later transpired that they'd been looking for someone
who is totally different.
- To learn more, I spoke to Rob Jenkins.
He's a psychologist who has published studies
looking at facial perception using hyper-realistic masks.
Can you talk about these experiments
you've been running in recent years
looking at how these masks are indeed fooling people?
- These hyper-realistic masks break the connection
that we've all become used to
between facial appearance and identity
and we were interested in whether people are getting away
with that kind of concealment because
people just aren't paying attention.
They don't see any reason to be looking at
a particular person's face
or maybe they're just not expecting
to see something like a highly realistic mask
and so it doesn't occur to them
that that might be what they're seeing
or if the masks really are so realistic
that they just pass for regular humans,
and so we wanted to test that more formally.
We had this computer based task
where we're showing people pairs of images on screen
and they just have to say which one is the mask.
Now, we've done that in a couple of ways.
One is just kind of at a glance.
So it's to model the sort of situation where,
you know, someone walks past.
We're talking like a, you know, half a second or something,
they just catch your eye.
And we did that because we thought
this task might be too easy,
and we'll just see everyone's performing perfectly, right?
That wasn't the case at all.
So people were terrible at making these discriminations
when it was a brief presentation.
So we decided to make it easier on them
and just say, all right, you can take as long as you like
and when they're given as long as they like,
that improves performance a little bit
but they're having a really hard time
and giving us the wrong answer
to this seemingly simple question
on about one in five trials.
- That's actually one of the reasons
I find this so interesting
is that we're evolutionarily programmed
to pick up on facial cues.
It's so much of our social interaction,
yet you have these masks that aren't necessarily
a hundred percent realistic still fooling
a good amount of people.
- Humans are social animals and so we rely
very much on getting whatever insight we can
into each other's mental states from our appearance.
So we can tell if someone's following along in conversation.
We can tell if they're cross with us or pleased to see us,
or skeptical of what we're telling them,
and we need to do that.
We also need to be able to connect it
to particular individuals so that when we see them again,
we can remember what happened last time
and behave accordingly.
- And this isn't necessarily for fun and games.
There's actually been some reports of these being used
in crimes to conceal identity, right?
- We started to notice a few years ago
that we were seeing reports in the news
of things like bank robberies where,
say, the police, were looking for someone
of a particular description
and it later transpired that they'd been looking for someone
who is totally different from the appearance
of the actual culprit.
So we're talking things like totally different age,
maybe different race, different gender,
that sort of thing and so you can see
how that kind of misleading of the investigation
could really get things off on the wrong path.
There was a case in the United States where
there was a string of bank robberies
that CCTV footage showed appeared to be carried out
by someone in their 70s or 80s,
and this figure gained a kind of anti-hero status online,
known as the Geezer Bandit
and so people were following him and, you know,
to some extent there was some cheering on
of this pensioner who was sticking it to the man
and he almost got caught on his final job.
So he was escaping on foot from the scene of the crime
and apparently ran off at such great speed
that people watching started to wonder if this
really was someone in their 70s or 80s and at that stage,
opinion started to shift towards, okay,
well this looks as if it could be
someone much younger wearing a mask
that's putting us off the scent.
- I think what's so interesting with that bank robbery case
is the disconnect between what people thought of
for his face and what people thought of
for his ability to run,
which old people don't do very well.
How might that disconnect be playing out
when people are making these judgements
about how a person might be able to move?
- If we want to improve detection of these masks
when they're being misused for criminal activities,
part of the solution might be to look for other cues
that conflict with the signal you're getting from the face.
There could be mismatches in apparent age.
So if the way the person is moving looks very youthful,
but the face looks very old and wrinkled and haggard,
that sort of useful mismatching cue.
So there are a number of things that you could look for
that are not directly to do with facial appearance
but exploits the facial appearance
in conjunction with other messages that you're getting
and that sort of conflict could be
a part of the detection story, I think.
- These hyper-realistic masks aren't anything new.
We've seen them in the movies but what seems to be new
is that the price has been down quite significantly.
Can you talk about maybe the evolution of the industry here,
how this is becoming more available
for regular folks like us?
- I think this started off in, like,
Hollywood special effects industry
and there are a few craftsmen who are masters of this
particular form of artistry and involved in sculpting
and monster-making and all the rest of it,
and they developed these techniques using
various materials over the years.
They started around 600 up to a thousand, maybe $1,500.
So I have one here that is
kind of an old favorite, this one.
So as you can see, it's made of this silicone material.
Silicone's very durable but also very flexible
and it kind of looks like human skin, in fact,
which is the idea, of course.
And it's not what most people think of
when they think of a mask
because it's a single piece that goes right over the head,
down the neck and over the shoulders
so there's no visible join at all.
So each one is hand-painted.
Every one is unique but you see all the details,
like little freckles and all the wrinkles are there.
Each one is hand-punched with human hair so, in this case,
eyebrows, there's a bit of ear hair there for added realism.
This is another example I've got
that has a full head of hair.
All of these developments over a number of years
have led to the position we're in now
where there are some manufacturers around the world
producing similar products along those lines
and as a consequence the price has come down a bit,
and we're starting to see these are more widespread
then they were initially.
- I mean, you have clearly shown that humans are
not very good at picking up these masks
but might that actually pose a problem
for facial recognition?
Are computers actually going to be able to
recognize these as fake faces?
- Although these hyper-realistic face masks
look a lot like real faces
in the visible spectrum of light,
there are other parts of the light spectrum
you could potentially play with.
So let's think about infrared.
The thermal signature of a real face
is gonna be quite different
from the thermal signature of a masked face,
especially when that mask is made of silicone
because silicone is a very good heat insulator, right?
So you can imagine if you had infrared vision,
which is a problem for humans but not at all
a problem for automatic face recognition systems,
that might just be a really quick and simple way
to tell, well, that's not a real head that I'm looking at
because it's not glowing.
- Are there gaps in the way that
we as humans can perceive faces?
- This is a question that's kind of new to science.
And we know that there's a range of ability
in identification tasks, just telling who's who.
Some people are really, really good at that
and in security and forensic contexts,
there's increasing interest
in being able to screen for those people
so that you can assign people to tasks
that involve face recognition who are naturally good at that
and tend not to make mistakes.
Whether you could do the same with this new task
of detecting synthetic faces is an open question
but it's one that we're looking in to.
- Thank you for showing us your real face today.
- Ha, that's what you think!
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