Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement

Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

Facial and expression recognition for the blind using computer vision

Gemstone Team FACE

Illumination invariant facial recognition using a piecewise-constant lighting model

In this paper we demonstrate a simple and novel illumination model that can be used for illumination invariant facial recognition. This model requires no prior knowledge of the illumination conditions and can be used when there is only a single training image per-person. The proposed illumination model separates the effects of illumination over a small area of the face into two components; an additive component modelling the mean illumination and a multiplicative component, modelling the variance within the facial area. Illumination invariant facial recognition is performed in a piecewise manner, by splitting the face image into blocks, then normalizing the illumination within each block based on the new lighting model. The assumptions underlying this novel lighting model have been verified on the YaleB face database. We show that magnitude 2D Fourier features can be used as robust facial descriptors within the new lighting model. Using only a single training image per-person, our new method achieves high (in most cases 100%) identification accuracy on the YaleB, extended YaleB and CMU-PIE face databases.

Neonatal Facial Coding System for assessing postoperative pain in infants:item reduction is valid and feasible

The objectives of this study were to: (1). evaluate the validity of the Neonatal Facial Coding System (NFCS) for assessment of postoperative pain and (2). explore whether the number of NFCS facial actions could be reduced for assessing postoperative pain.

Bedside application of the Neonatal Facial Coding System in pain assessment of premature neonates

Assessment of infant pain is a pressing concern, especially within the context of neonatal intensive care where infants may be exposed to prolonged and repeated pain during lengthy hospitalization. In the present study the feasibility of carrying out the complete Neonatal Facial Coding System (NFCS) in real time at bedside, specifically reliability, construct and concurrent validity, was evaluated in a tertiary level Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Heel lance was used as a model of procedural pain, and observed with n = 40 infants at 32 weeks gestational age. Infant sleep/wake state, NFCS facial activity and specific hand movements were coded during baseline, unwrap, swab, heel lance, squeezing and recovery events. Heart rate was recorded continuously and digitally sampled using a custom designed computer system. Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed statistically significant differences across events for facial activity (P <0.0001) and heart rate (P <0.0001). Planned comparisons showed facial activity unchanged during baseline, swab and unwrap, then increased significantly during heel lance (P <0.0001), increased further during squeezing (P <0.003), then decreased during recovery (P <0.0001). Systematic shifts in sleep/wake state were apparent. Rise in facial activity was consistent with increased heart rate, except that facial activity more closely paralleled initiation of the invasive event. Thus facial display was more specific to tissue damage compared with heart rate. Inter-observer reliability was high. Construct validity of the NFCS at bedside was demonstrated as invasive procedures were distinguished from tactile. While bedside coding of behavior does not permit raters to be blind to events, mechanical recording of heart rate allowed for an independent source of concurrent validation for bedside application of the NFCS scale.

The expression of pain in infants and toddlers:developmental changes in facial action

Age-related changes in the facial expression of pain during the first 18 months of life have important implications for our understanding of pain and pain assessment. We examined facial reactions video recorded during routine immunization injections in 75 infants stratified into 2-, 4-, 6-, 12-, and 18-month age groups. Two facial coding systems differing in the amount of detail extracted were applied to the records. In addition, parents completed a brief questionnaire that assessed child temperament and provided background information. Parents' efforts to soothe the children also were described. While there were consistencies in facial displays over the age groups, there also were differences on both measures of facial activity, indicating systematic variation in the nature and severity of distress. The least pain was expressed by the 4-month age group. Temperament was not related to the degree of pain expressed. Systematic variations in parental soothing behaviour indicated accommodation to the age of the child. Reasons for the differing patterns of facial activity are examined, with attention paid to the development of inhibitory mechanisms and the role of negative emotions such as anger and anxiety.

Judging pain in newborns:facial and cry determinants

Explored the facial and cry characteristics that adults use when judging an infant's pain. Sixteen women viewed videotaped reactions of 36 newborns subjected to noninvasive thigh rubs and vitamin K injections in the course of routine care and rated discomfort. The group mean interrater reliability was high. Detailed descriptions of the infants' facial reactions and cry sounds permitted specification of the determinants of distress judgments. Several facial variables (a brow bulge, eyes squeezed shut, and deepened nasolabial fold constellation, and taut tongue) accounted for 49% of the variance in ratings of affective discomfort after controlling for ratings of discomfort during a noninvasive event. In a separate analysis not including facial activity, several cry variables (formant frequency, latency to cry) also accounted for variance (38%) in ratings. When the facial and cry variables were considered together, cry variables added little to the prediction of ratings in comparison to facial variables. Cry would seem to command attention, but facial activity, rather than cry, can account for the major variations in adults' judgments of neonatal pain.

A comparison of two measures of facial activity during pain in the newborn child

Facial activity is strikingly visible in infants reacting to noxious events. Two measures that reduce this activity to composite events, the Neonatal Facial Coding System (NFCS) and the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), were used to examine facial expressions of 56 neonates responding to routine heel lancing for blood sampling purposes. The NFCS focuses upon a limited subset of all possible facial actions that had been identified previously as responsive to painful events, whereas the FACS is a comprehensive system that is inclusive of all facial actions. Descriptions of the facial expressions obtained from the two measurement systems were very similar, supporting the convergent validity of the shorter, more readily applied system. As well, the cluster of facial activity associated with pain in this sample, using either measure, was similar to the cluster of facial activity associated with pain in adults and other newborns, both full-term and preterm, providing construct validity for the position that the face encodes painful distress in infants and adults.