Deep Fakes in real time

Deep Fakes are imitations of pictures and video, created using artificial intelligence. Common scenarios include exchanging faces in order to create the illusion to see another person in a video.  Within the scope of a research project, the TNG Innovation Hacking team investigated Deep Fakes to better understand what is technically feasible. Furthermore, we wanted to explore the limitations of the technology - especially if and with what image quality it is possible to create Deep Fakes in real time.

Our research shows that it is possibled to exchange the face of a person filmed via a real-time video streamwith the face of another person, including applying facial expressions and movements of the person filmed.

By applying various techniques from the area of computer vision and neural networks, faces in the video feed are recognized, transformed and embedded in the video output. The project uses autoencoder networks trained in Keras. They were trained using so called GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks). Aditionally, the developers used different neuronal networks for face recognition and segmentation.