{"id":587063,"date":"2026-09-01T16:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T16:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/587063\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T16:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T16:44:13","slug":"this-digital-camouflage-shirt-confuses-ai-powered-surveillance-cameras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/587063\/","title":{"rendered":"This ‘Digital Camouflage’ Shirt Confuses AI-Powered Surveillance Cameras"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am standing in front of a camera that\u2019s streaming to a giant video screen. The image recognition AI running on the camera puts a big green box around me. \u201cPERSON,\u201d it says. Artist Simon Weckert hands me his newest creation, a button-down shirt with flowery, blurry globs of green and pink. I put the shirt in front of me. The box and the word \u201cPERSON\u201d disappears. I pull the shirt away. The box pops back up. I put the shirt in front of me. It disappears. This is \u201cdigital camouflage<\/a>,\u201d and it has confused the algorithm.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Weckert designed digital camouflage as a response to the proliferation of AI-powered surveillance cameras that detect people, vehicles, animals, bicycles, and other objects in their field of view. Many of these AI-powered cameras can detect when a person is lying down, \u201canomalous behavior<\/a>\u201d such as people loitering, people fighting, or an abandoned package, which can lead to a police response. These cameras are already relatively commonplace around the world, but Weckert created it because police recently deployed these types of cameras outside of Kotbusser Tor<\/a>, a popular subway stop in Berlin. They are the first police-run object recognition surveillance cameras in the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously people don\u2019t like it because it means that AI is tracking the movements and behaviors of people. It\u2019s one thing to have somebody behind the camera watching you, but now we have AI doing this kind of analysis,\u201d Weckert told me. \u201cIt can detect if somebody\u2019s laying on the ground so that means homeless people could be detected and police get triggered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weckert says one of the problems with Berlin\u2019s cameras is that it\u2019s not clear exactly which image recognition it\u2019s running. But many image recognition cameras run a variation of YOLO (You Only Look Once), a family of open source image recognition algorithms<\/a>. So Weckert installed YOLO on his own camera and began trying to confuse it by iterating on different types of random patterns.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He starts with a random pattern he said, and shows it to the YOLO algorithm to see if it detects a human, and with how much certainty. \u201cWhen YOLO returns 100%, I know the pattern obviously isn\u2019t working,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then step-by-step, I change the pattern, I rotate certain parts of the pattern, change the colors, flip it so on and so forth. And every time we ask how much confidence do you have this is a person using something called gradient ascent to get away from the category of a person. And then suddenly you as a person, with the pattern on you, aren\u2019t detected as a person because the algorithm can\u2019t make sense of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weckert has done a series of buzzy projects before. Back at Motherboard, we covered the virtual traffic jam<\/a> he created on Google Maps by sticking a bunch of GPS-enabled cell phones in a red wagon and walking slowly through the streets of Berlin. Digital camouflage sits alongside projects by other artists<\/a> intended to hide people\u2019s faces from facial recognition cameras or to confuse automated license plate reader cameras with shirts made of nonsense license plate graphics. Over the years, AI surveillance has improved to a point where many of these techniques don\u2019t actually work anymore, but for the moment, digital camouflage does, at least on the very popular YOLO algorithms. Weckert said one of the major problems is that police won\u2019t say specifically what algorithm they\u2019re using, making it difficult to say whether his shirts work on the cameras at Kotbusser Tor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is that we don\u2019t know what technology is behind these camera systems, so therefore I cannot claim 100 percent that the t-shirt works against this specific camera system, but I can say I know it works for the very public and famous YOLO algorithm,\u201d Weckert said. He said that just as fashion brands have seasonal updates, so too will his digital camouflage \u201cEvery time there\u2019s a new YOLO, a new pattern will come out. Just like in fashion, the summer winter collection, here it\u2019s the every YOLO edition.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the project is not just intended to help people avoid surveillance, but to teach people about it and to show people there\u2019s lots of ways to protest and push back against it. \u201cIt\u2019s to give them the feeling that there are actually certain tools we can use against surveillance. It’s not like we just have to accept what the lawmakers and police are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

About the author<\/p>\n

Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.<\/p>\n

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