Some
hyper-realistic masks more believable than human faces, study suggests
University
of York
 |
| Stan Winston School |
In
a study by the Universities of York and Kyoto, researchers asked participants
to look at pairs of photographs and decide which showed a normal face and which
showed a person wearing a mask.
Surprisingly, participants made the wrong call in one-in-five cases.
The
20% error rate observed in the study likely underestimates the extent to which
people would struggle to tell an artificial face from the real thing outside of
the lab, the researchers say
The
researchers collected data from participants from both the UK and Japan to
establish any differences according to race. When asked to choose between
photographs depicting faces of a different race to the trial participant,
response times were slower and selections were 5% less accurate.
Dr Rob Jenkins from the Department of Psychology at the University of York, said: "In our study participants had several advantages over ordinary people in everyday life. We made it clear to participants that their task was to identify the mask in each pair of images and we showed them example masks before the test began.
"The
real-world error rate is likely to be much higher because many people may not
even be aware hyper-realistic masks exist and are unlikely to be looking out
for them.
"The
current generation of masks is very realistic indeed with most people
struggling to tell an artificial face from the real thing."
There
are now dozens of criminal cases in which culprits have passed themselves off
as people of a different age, race or gender, sending police investigations
down the wrong path.
In
one recent case, an international gang used a hyper-realistic mask to
impersonate a French minister, defrauding business executives out of millions
of pounds.
Dr
Jet Sanders, who worked on the study while a PhD student at the University of
York, said: "Failure to detect synthetic faces may have important
implications for security and crime prevention as hyper-realistic masks may
allow the key characteristics of a persons' appearance to be incorrectly
identified.
"These
masks currently cost around £1000 each and we expect them to become more widely
used as advances in manufacturing make them more affordable."
The
research is published in the open access journal Cognitive Research:
Principles and Implications. It was supported by the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC) and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
