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		</div><p>Some masks are so realistic that people frequently cannot tell them apart from human faces, a study has found.</p>
<p>Participants were fooled by the masks in a fifth of cases, researchers from the Universities of York and Kyoto found.</p>
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<p>So-called “hyper-realistic” silicone masks are designed to imitate real human faces, leaving no freckle, wrinkle or wisp of hair unaccounted for.</p>
<p>The researchers believe the devices, which cost around £1,000, will only become more convincing and could be exploited by criminals as a disguise.</p>
<p>The current generation of masks is very realistic indeed with most people struggling to tell an artificial face from the real thing.</p>
<p>They asked 240 participants in the UK and Japan to look at pairs of photographs and decide which showed a face and which showed a person wearing a mask.</p>
<p>They were fooled by the masks a fifth of the time.</p>
<p>This is believed to be an underestimate of how likely they are to be mistaken for real faces in real life.</p>
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<p>Dr Rob Jenkins, from the Department of Psychology at the University of York, said: “The real-world error rate is likely to be much higher because many people may not even be aware hyper-realistic masks exist and are unlikely to be looking out for them.</p>
<p>“The current generation of masks is very realistic indeed with most people struggling to tell an artificial face from the real thing.”</p>
<p>The researchers say facial disguise is not a new problem, but “the level of realism that is achievable with these masks does raise new questions”.</p>
<p>They say there have been dozens of crimes where culprits have used masks to pass themselves off as someone of a different age, race or gender and mislead investigators.</p>
<p>Most reports have been in the US but there are three cases in the UK they are aware of – a jewellery heist in 2009, a series of 14 bank robberies in 2012 and another jewellery heist in 2015.</p>
<p>In another recent case, an international gang used a hyper-realistic mask to impersonate a French minister, defrauding business executives out of millions of pounds.</p>
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<p>Dr Jet Sanders, who worked on the study while a PhD student at the University of York, said: “Failure to detect synthetic faces may have important implications for security and crime prevention as hyper-realistic masks may allow the key characteristics of a person’s appearance to be incorrectly identified.</p>
<p>“These masks currently cost around £1,000 each and we expect them to become more widely used as advances in manufacturing make them more affordable.”</p>
<p>They conclude: “People are rightly wary of photorealistic images because they know that images can be manipulated.</p>
<p>“We may be entering a time where the same concerns apply to facial appearance in the real world.”</p>
<p>The study is published in Cognitive Research: Principles And Implications.</p>
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