A range of rather interesting fashion clothing could be used by those who want to stuff up CCTV facial recognition systems.

Designed by the hyperface project involves printing patterns on to clothing or textiles that computers think is a face, in fightback against spying technology

German artist and technologist Adam Harvey aims to confuse these facial recognition systems by presenting them with shed-loads of false hits so they can’t tell which one is the real McCoy.

Patterns are printed onto clothing so that the computer sees them as eyes, mouths and other features that a computer can interpret as a face.

Speaking at the Chaos Communications Congress hacking conference in Hamburg, Harvey said: “You can change the way you appear, but, in camouflage you can think of the figure and the ground relationship. There’s also an opportunity to modify the ‘ground’, the things that appear next to you, around you, and that can also modify the computer vision confidence score.”

His method involves “overloading an algorithm with what it wants, over-saturating an area with faces to divert the gaze of the computer vision algorithm.”