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posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 22 2020, @01:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-get-the-voice-right dept.

This Open-Source Program Deepfakes You During Zoom Meetings, in Real Time:

Video conferencing apps like Zoom and Skype are usually boring and often frustrating. With more people than ever using this software to work from home, users are finding new ways to spice up endless remote meetings and group hangs by looping videos of themselves looking engaged, adding wacky backgrounds, and now, using deepfake filters for impersonating celebrities when you're tired of your own face staring back at you in the front-facing camera window.

Avatarify is a program that superimposes someone else's face onto yours in real-time, during video meetings. The code is available on Github for anyone to use.

Programmer Ali Aliev used the open-source code from the "First Order Motion Model for Image Animation," published on the arxiv preprint server earlier this year, to build Avatarify. First Order Motion, developed by researchers at the University of Trento in Italy as well as Snap, Inc., drives a photo of a person using a video of another person—such as footage of an actor—without any prior training on the target image.

With other face-swap technologies, like deepfakes, the algorithm is trained on the face you want to swap, usually requiring several images of the person's face you're trying to animate. This model can do it in real-time, by training the algorithm on similar categories of the target (like faces).

"I ran [the First Order Model] on my PC and was surprised by the result. What's important, it worked fast enough to drive an avatar real-time," Aliev told Motherboard. "Developing a prototype was a matter of a couple of hours and I decided to make fun of my colleagues with whom I have a Zoom call each Monday. And that worked. As they are all engineers and researchers, the first reaction was curiosity and we soon began testing the prototype."


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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday April 22 2020, @11:31PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 22 2020, @11:31PM (#985898) Homepage Journal

    On a dating app you might want to deepfake yourself as a younger version of yourself for a better first impression -- that won't immediately be recognized as a flat-out lie when you meet in person.

    -- hendrik

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