Why is placing a black bar only over someone’s eyes considered adequate enough to not be able to identify them?
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The human brain has a whole section dedicated specifically to recognizing face-shaped things. This is why we experience [pareidolia,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia) which is why we see smiley faces as faces despite the fact they are literally 2 dots, an arc, and a circle.
But that part of our brain has some pretty serious limitations. It has to, because picking out faces consistently is such a complicated task we can’t get massive supercomputer clusters to do it reliably yet. One of those limitations is that if the eyes are totally obscured, our recognition of the face becomes significantly weaker. We may pass over it entirely if we aren’t looking for it, and if we do spot it we won’t remember it because it doesn’t look like a face is supposed to. So by obscuring the eyes on a photo, you’re messing with the part of your brain which does facial recognition, basically making it impossible to remember the details accurately.
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It isn’t any more, not with sofisticated face recognition algorithms. Before those, humans were doing the recognising and most humans get a lot of their data from the eye area as they spend most of their time looking there.
It really isn’t enough to mask the identity to someone who actually know the person, or even really make it that much harder for someone who doesn’t.
Check this paper out, sure it “significantly decreases” recognition, but partially covering the face still means almost 70% recognition rate, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the eyes or any other part that is covered. If you want anonymity you have to cover the entire face.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21046866/
So Batman and Superman’s disguises do work?
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