Chinese students develop ‘invisibility cloak’ to evade security cameras: How will it work

A team of Chinese graduate students have come up with an innovation that can hide human bodies from AI-monitored security cameras. These students have designed a simple and low-cost coat that can hide humans from cameras during both day and night situations. The team has confirmed that the InvisDefense coat will be visible to human eyes. However, it will be covered by a pattern that will not only blind cameras during the day but will also send out unusual heat signals at night.
According to a report by South China Morning Post, the InvisDefense has also won the first prize in a creative work contest sponsored by Huawei. This contest was held recently as part of the China Postgraduate Innovation and Practice Competitions. The report also adds that the project was supervised by Wang Zheng, who is a professor at the school of computer science at Wuhan University. Apart from this, a top academic conference on artificial intelligence, AAAI 2023 has also accepted the developers’ paper on the invention
InvisDefense ‘invisibility cloak’: How will it work
As per professor Zheng, several surveillance devices are capable of detecting human bodies. For example, road cameras are equipped with pedestrian detection functions while smart cars can identify roads, pedestrians and obstacles. He claimed that the InvisDefense ‘invisibility cloak’ will allow the camera to capture users but they won’t be able to determine if a human is inside the coat.
Cameras often use motion and contour recognition to detect human bodies during the day. The InvisDefense comes with a specially designed camouflage pattern on its surface that interferes with the recognition algorithm of machine vision. This effectively blinds the camera and makes it hard to identify the wearer as a person.
Meanwhile, at night, cameras use infrared thermal imaging to track human bodies. In such cases, the InvisDefense creates an unusual temperature pattern with the help of the irregularly shaped temperature-controlling modules attached to the inner surface of the ‘invisibility cloak’. Such unusual temperature patterns can easily confuse infrared cameras.

Wei Hui, who was a part of the InvisDefense team’s core algorithm department has claimed that balancing the camouflage pattern is the most difficult part to make the ‘invisibility cloak’ work properly.
The researchers used bright images to interfere with the machine vision and it seemed to work. However, this pattern may make the user even more “conspicuous” as it stands out to human eyes, Hui added. He also noted that algorithms were used to design the least conspicuous patterns that can disable computer vision.
Moreover, the team of researchers also had to go through hundreds of tests over three months before coming up with the best pattern.
InvisDefense ‘invisibility cloak’: Other advantages
InvisDefense is also a low-cost ‘invisibility cloak’ as the researchers have claimed that printing a pattern on the surface is relatively cheap. The students also mentioned that only four temperature control modules are required to blind the infrared cameras. Professor Zheng also noted that the cost of a complete set of InvisDefense is less than 500 yuan (nearly Rs 6,000).

Zheng also reported that InvisDefense is the first product in the industry that can successfully avoid public pedestrian detection and does not arouse suspicion from the human eye. Researchers also did campus testing to determine that this ‘invisibility cloak’ can reduce the accuracy of pedestrian detection by 57%. Zheng even said that this cloak can also be used during “anti-drone combat or human-machine confrontation on the battlefield.”