Book Image

Exploring Deepfakes

By : Bryan Lyon, Matt Tora
Book Image

Exploring Deepfakes

By: Bryan Lyon, Matt Tora

Overview of this book

Applying Deepfakes will allow you to tackle a wide range of scenarios creatively. Learning from experienced authors will help you to intuitively understand what is going on inside the model. You’ll learn what deepfakes are and what makes them different from other machine learning techniques, and understand the entire process from beginning to end, from finding faces to preparing them, training the model, and performing the final swap. We’ll discuss various uses for face replacement before we begin building our own pipeline. Spending some extra time thinking about how you collect your input data can make a huge difference to the quality of the final video. We look at the importance of this data and guide you with simple concepts to understand what your data needs to really be successful. No discussion of deepfakes can avoid discussing the controversial, unethical uses for which the technology initially became known. We’ll go over some potential issues, and talk about the value that deepfakes can bring to a variety of educational and artistic use cases, from video game avatars to filmmaking. By the end of the book, you’ll understand what deepfakes are, how they work at a fundamental level, and how to apply those techniques to your own needs.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Understanding Deepfakes
6
Part 2: Getting Hands-On with the Deepfake Process
10
Part 3: Where to Now?

Identifying suitable candidates for a swap

While it is technically possible to swap any face with another, creating a convincing deepfake requires paying some attention to the attributes of your source and destination faces. Depending on what you hope to achieve from your deepfake, this may be more or less important to you, but assuming that you wish to create a convincing swap, you should pay attention to the following attributes.

  • Face/head shape: Are the shapes of the faces similar to one another? If one face is quite narrow and the other quite round, then while the facial features will be correct, the final swap is unlikely to be particularly convincing if the final swap contains a head shape that is significantly different from the individual you are attempting to target.
  • Hairline/hairstyles: While it is possible to do full head swaps, these are generally harder to pull off, as hair is complex, and hairstyles can change significantly. You will generally be swapping...