In recent days, the Deep-Live-Cam program has taken social media by storm. It creates high-quality facial expressions in real time.
The program adds a facial digitization based on a person’s face to a live webcam feed, tracking pose, lighting, and facial expressions. The results are not perfect, but the current level is impressive.
Deep-Live-Cam has been in development since the end of last year, but the project has recently started to attract attention on the Internet. The video clearly demonstrates the ability to «dress up» the faces of Mark Zuckerberg, George Clooney, and others.
The sudden surge in popularity briefly pushed the open source project to the top of GitHub’s trending resources. The openness and free nature of the software makes it fully accessible to anyone with minimal programming skills.
The possible fraudulent use of Deep-Live-Cam is a cause for concern. The program actually allows you to use someone else’s face and opens up many opportunities for abuse. Users express the opinion that it is now appropriate to have some additional confirmation of identity — for example, a code word.
The emergence of the word «deepfake» is attributed to a case in 2017. A Reddit user used it as a marker when demonstrating the ability to replace porn actors’ faces with celebrities’ faces. Back then, such technologies were slow, expensive, and far from real-time. Nowadays, however, virtually anyone can do it, with a minimum of effort and cost.
Criminals are already using such tools. As a reminder, in February, fraudsters in China impersonated company executives, including the CFO, during a video call and deceived forced an employee to transfer more than $25 million. This employee was the only real person on the video conference. Recently, in the U.S cloned Joe Biden’s voice and dissuaded people from voting in the New Hampshire primaries. With the emergence of programs like Deep-Live-Cam, remote video fraud may become more common.
Source: TechSpot