Your Words But On Someone Else’s Face – Creepy or Exciting?
A team of researchers from Germany and the US have developed a first of its kind face break-through in video recording. They have developed a method which copies the facial expressions of the source actor and transfers them as it is to the target actor.
The software trackers keep a close track of the subject’s face even when it’s away from the camera, or in different light conditions of the source and the target actor. It was at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and Stanford University that this technique of facial expression reenactment was developed. It will be presented in the computer graphics conference in Japan in early November.
Imagine your words coming out of one of these pretty mouths.
Even though the software doesn’t register eye motions, it takes into account the shape, size, colour, angle of the face, and then transfers the facial expressions with the help of a proxy mouth on the target actor’s face. The technology holds immense potential if worked upon further. It can be used in multi-lingual video conferences for real-time translation, along with being used in virtual reality and editing.
“It seems like there’s a lot of demand for it. Essentially it can do to video what Photoshop did to images,” says team member Matthias Niessner.
However, as always, this software comes with its own potential dangers if put to misuse. It can be used in identity thefts and wreak different degrees of havoc depending on the person being impersonated. The team which developed this software is convinced that all these activities can be checked and prevented with the right technological regulations.
