Want to beat facial recognition? Get some funky tortoiseshell glasses

Eyewear printed with a wild pattern can be enough to fool commercial systems into misidentification, research shows

A team of researchers from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University have created sets of eyeglasses that can prevent wearers from being identified by facial recognition systems, or even fool the technology into identifying them as completely unrelated individuals.

In their paper, Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition, presented at the 2016 Computer and Communications Security conference, the researchers present their system for what they describe as "physically realisable" and "inconspicuous" attacks on facial biometric systems, which are designed to exclusively identify a particular individual.