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?

Training a model

This part of the process requires the least amount of manual intervention but will take the longest in terms of compute time. Depending on the model chosen and the hardware in use, this can take anywhere from 12 hours to several weeks to complete.

It is advised to use a relatively lightweight model when creating a deepfake for the first time. Creating swaps is fairly nuanced, and understanding what works and what doesn’t comes with experience. Whilst Faceswap offers several models, starting with the Original or Lightweight model will allow you to gauge the performance of the swap relatively quickly, while not necessarily giving you the best possible final result.

Faceswap comes with numerous configurable settings for models and training. These are available within the Settings menu of the application. To cover all of these settings is well outside of the scope of this walk-through, so default settings will be used unless otherwise stated.

Setting up...