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NVIDIA-Powered Neural Network Produces Freakishly Natural Fake Human Photos (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA released a paper recently detailing a new machine learning methodology for generating unique and realistic looking faces using a generative adversarial network (GAN). The result is the ability to artificially render photorealistic human faces of "unprecedented quality." NVIDIA achieves this by using an algorithm that pairs two neural networks -- a generator and a discriminator -- that compete against each other. The generator starts from a low resolution image and builds upon it, while the discriminator assesses the results, sort of like a constant critic, pointing out where things have gone wrong. The GAN is not a new technology, but where NVIDIA differentiates is through the progressive training method it developed. NVIDIA took a database of photographs of famous people and used that to train its system. By working together, the neural networks were able to produce fake images that are nearly indistinguishable from real human photographs, and a little creepy too.
Do they look creepy? They look like many or the retouched "real" photos you see in the media all the time to me!
The real trick is when they are animated.
I remember a back in 2000 where they were showing screen shots of the upcoming final fantasy movie. The screen shots looks like real people without the uncanny valley. However when they started moving and talking then it came to light.
Granted graphics and animation have improved greatly in the past 18 years but I hold my doubts until I can see the rendered images move and interact.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I want an algo that I can feed my own pictures to and it will produce a picture that resembles me enough to be recognizable by a human who knows me in person, but won't match my actual face using facial recognition (as in it would subtly change the biometrics of my face like distance between eyes, between mouth and nose, etc). That would make for a good dating profile pic - it looks like me in person so its nobody is surprised if we meet in person, but the dating site can't easily link all my data based on facial recognition.
The rendered images look strikingly like actual human photographs, I'll bet they could fool nearly everyone -- you'd have to have a reason to think they were fake.
I'm wondering if their choice of celebrities as the training database somehow skews their results positive versus "ordinary" people. Celebrities almost seem too uniform in terms of facial features and general appearance. It makes me wonder if they tried with ordinary people if the algorithm woudln't produce freaks because it sees odd deviations among normal people.
Since photographic evidence is commonly used to convict people of a crime, I can't but help wonder if our legal system will be able to keep up with technology in order to avoid the manipulation that may ultimately condemn an innocent person.
It's quite concerning when the term "indistinguishable" is used to describe technology, as 12 randomly selected citizens can be indistinguishable from a group of morons who are unable to tell the difference between real and fake.
You can't get back detail that is missing from a low resolution image, so you can't go e.g. from an SD resolution movie to a 4K one, or at least the result won't look like a movie shot in 4K. Conventional upscaling is basically interpolate-and-sharpen, and it gives only a minor improvement. But while you can't get back the original missing detail, what you could in theory do is generate plausible synthetic detail.
Since this technique seems to involve building up the image through a series of increasing resolutions, I'm wondering if instead of generating a completely synthetic image, you could take a low resolution frame as the starting point, and use similar methods to add plausible synthetic detail. I would have thought that that would actually be a lot easier to generate a good result than if you're trarting from scratch to create a completely synthetic image.
Could it be that our Kazaa-era porn favourites will one day be viewable in 4K quality after all?
Oh no... it's the future.
People went to see toy story and other animations. They went to see Avatar. They will see movies with synthetic actors too - when those get good enough. No more overpaid actors or problems with stunts. No body doubles, no issues with nakedness or "I won't play that sort of character". Instead of actors they pay a team of animators, but those are more replaceable and can't demand crazy pay.
After a while, some of the synthetic actors will become famous, and attract moviegoers just like a real star (or like mickey mouse) . But without a real star's price tag.