Facial recognition could soon be used to identify masked protesters

"V for Vendetta" masks are a typical feature of many political protests since the eponymous dystopian movie came out in 2005 — but what if facial recognition technology was able to identify the face behind the mask? 

We're not there yet, but researchers are slowly and steadily making highly-controversial steps in this direction. 

Academics from Cambridge University, India's National Institute of Technology, and the Indian Institute of Science used deep learning and a dataset of pictures of people in disguise to try to identify masked faces with an acceptable level of reliability.  Read more...