Scientist Reveals How Fake Videos Of Persons Are Made

Some persons leverage on the multi-faceted possibilities in technology to create videos of people saying things they never said.

Computer Scientist, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, explained this on TED Talk (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in a tweet on Friday.

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He started off by playing before the audience, a video of former United States president, Barack Obama (wearing different clothes), and saying the same thing in 4 segmented videos.

Suwajanakorn cuts in, adding that the videos were not real.

“None of these is actually real,” he said.

According to Suwajanakorn, some inventors, in a move to preserve the knowledge of the Holocaust from Survivors, had to set the pace for such technology.

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“It allows you to have interactive conversation with the hologram of Holocaust survivor.

“This answers were pre-recorded in a studio yet the effect is outstanding, you feel so connected to a story and to him as a person,” he said.

A hologram is a physical recording of an interference pattern which reproduces a three-dimensional (3D) light field, that displays the properties of the original scene.

In a bid to advance such technology with color combination, the scientist said that researchers brainstormed to create a model that looks, talks and acts just like real people with all the features.

“I eventually came up with a new solution that can build a model of a person using existing photos and videos of a person.

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“First, we introduced a new technique that can reconstruct high detailed 3D face model from any image, without ever 3-D scanning the person.

“This also works on videos by running the same algorithm on each video frame and generate a moving 3D model,” he mentioned.

He further added that the photo collection could be from typical photos.

“It doesn’t really matter what expression you are making or where you took those photos, what matters is that there are a lot of them.

“Now when you transfer the motion from the input video we can actual drive the entire party,” he said.

Meanwhile, he stressed that the technology poses great threat to truth and can be used to promote falsehood without people knowing.

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“This result seems very realistic and intriguing but at the same time frightening.

“One thing that concerns me is its potential for misuse, people have been thinking about this problem since the day Photoshop hit the market.

“As a research, we are also working on a counter measure technology…to detect fake images and videos,” he said.

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