Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/09/2016 13:54 -0400
In recent years, many have voiced increasing concerns with their ability to place trust in official data, and have faith in conventional narratives.
And for good reason: just yesterday a University of Chicago finance professor, while being interviewed at the Ambrosetti Forum, said that it is all about preserving confidence and trust in a “rigged game”: “if people are told enough by smart people on television that the economy has been fixed, and the market is a reflection of the fundamentals, then they’ll blindly support anything the Fed does.”
But while the saying “don’t believe everything [or anything] you read” and “trust but verify” may be more appropriate now than ever, the following video is an absolute stunner in its revelation of just how deep “real-time” media deception can truly go.
In a recently published paper by the Stanford lab of Matthias Niessner titled “Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos“, the authors show how disturbingly easy it is to take a surrogate actor and, in real time using everyday available tools, reenact their face and create the illusion that someone else, notably someone famous or important, is speaking. Even more disturbing: one doesn’t need sophisticated equipment to create a “talking” clone – a commodity webcam and some software is all one needs to create the greatest of sensory manipulations.
From the paper abstract:
We present a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam. Our goal is to animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-render the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion. To this end, we first address the under-constrained problem of facial identity recovery from monocular video by non-rigid model-based bundling. At run time, we track facial expressions of both source and target video using a dense photometric consistency measure. Reenactment is then achieved by fast and efficient deformation transfer between source and target. The mouth interior that best matches the re-targeted expression is retrieved from the target sequence and warped to produce an accurate fit. Finally, we convincingly re-render the synthesized target face on top of the corresponding video stream such that it seamlessly blends with the real-world illumination. We demonstrate our method in a live setup, where Youtube videos are reenacted in real time.
In simple English: famous “talking heads” speaking, chatting, interacting on TV can be practically anyone masquerading as said celebrity, and due to the real time conversion, they can talk, react, answer questions and generally emote so that the deception is flawless and totally convincing.
So striking is the real time effect of the conversion, the creators of this algorithm felt the need to clarify their intentions:
This demo video is purely research-focused and we would like to clarify the goals and intent of our work. Our aim is to demonstrate the capabilities of modern computer vision and graphics technology, and convey it in an approachable and fun way. We want to emphasize that computer-generated videos have been part in feature-film movies for over 30 years. Virtually every high-end movie production contains a significant percentage of synthetically-generated content (from Lord of the Rings to Benjamin Button). These results are hard to distinguish from reality and it often goes unnoticed that the content is not real. The novelty and contribution of our work is that we can edit pre-recorded videos in real-time on a commodity PC. Please also note that our efforts include the detection of edits in video footage in order to verify a clip’s authenticity. For additional information, we refer to our project website (see above). Hopefully, you enjoyed watching our video, and we hope to provide a positive takeaway 🙂
Sadly, while the creators of this stunning technology are forthcoming about their intentions, we doubt many others, those who seek to manipulate and deceive the mass population by ways of the one medium everyone can relate to, namely TV, will be.
And to appreciate just how profoundly deceptive this technology can (and will) be for mass media manipulative purposes, watch the shocking 6 minute clip below.
The anti-Christ will use this and you will not be able to believe your Computer-Eyes.
This is news???
CNN in ’91 for fucks sake….
just what we need, as if i am not messed up enough
Holy shit. It used to be said — “Well, believe your own eyes!” — and that was the end of that. We are literally here, now, where nothing you see on video can be believed.
This will be an absolute boon to the already nutty Tin Foil crowd.
Just go back to sleep stuck, nothing to see here….
““if people are told enough by smart people on television that the economy has been fixed, and the market is a reflection of the fundamentals, then they’ll blindly support anything the Fed does.”
———– article
Stanley Milgram, of the famous obedience/electric-shock experiment (more on him tomorrow) also conducted other experiments showing the gullibility of people.
One of them had a group of six people sitting at a long desk. All but one person, the last person, were “in” on the experiment. All were given an incredibly easy “problem” to solve, and a multiple choice with the correct answer. The first five would give the SAME and INCORRECT answer. The sixth person, even though he ABSOLUTELY KNEW the right answer …. would give the SAME incorrect answer the majority of the time!!
I suspect this type of video spoofing has been around for a while. The difference here is that it can be done by anyone with very little equipment (a camera and a PC) IN REAL TIME instead of requiring a mainframe, a recording studio, and a couple hours processing time.
Nothing to see???
So, you’re saying that technology IN THE ABOVE VIDEO has been available for a long time?
dilligaf, this is a whole different thing than putting some idiot in front of a green screen. You’re running the video of another person’s face like a puppet. Add a voice double and you can make anybody say anything in a video that can’t be distinguished (at least with the naked eyeear) from the real thing. Did you watch the video?
Thanks genius, for splain’ it to me…
If you cant get the connection, well, im sorry….
So pretty much anything on TeeVee or digitally elsewhere can no longer be 100% trusted. SUPER!
Cylons Unite!! Frak it all.
Brian says: So pretty much anything on TeeVee or digitally elsewhere can no longer be 100% trusted.
____________________
This is rich…
However, +2 on the BSG reference!
dilligaf, we’re talking about this: “In simple English: famous “talking heads” speaking, chatting, interacting on TV can be practically anyone masquerading as said celebrity, and due to the real time conversion, they can talk, react, answer questions and generally emote so that the deception is flawless and totally convincing. ”
It seems like you need some help in keeping up with us.
My God, you are truly brain dead.
This is not news.
To the pseudo awake, I guess it is.
Carry on….
Interesting but this should be hardly surprising, especially when you compare the computing power and allied resources (memory, disk capacity / access speed) available on today’s even “modest specification” laptop machines.
Choose a tower system and this capability is VERY easily in reach – i7 4770K CPU, 8G DDR3 memory, say a decent graphics card (4G DDR3), SSD or fast Hybrid HD capacity (5T per pack is now readily available off the shelf), and with a number of available bays, the usable internal storage capacity (for a modest outlay) can be 25T easy.
ALL motherboards supporting the i7 series also support onboard USB3 – usually a few ports built in with headers for a few more, so external storage is easy and fast – as for ext. HD – both WD and Seagate do very cheap USB3 5T external drives (in comparison to the 1T drives of yesteryear), so offline storage is available too.
Cost? If you are prepared to “build it yourself” around $2000 AU. That’s what I paid for this machine (which I described above). Add a half decent keyboard / mouse (e.g. Logitech MX800 combo) and you’ve got the tools to do what they did, just as well.
Phil, to do this type of rendering in real time I don’t think you could use external or even internal spinning hard drives, they’re too slow. Flash drive? Maybe. Realistically you’re much better off with enough memory to do the rendering without swapping, so I think having a large amount of memory on the system would be the most important criteria and I’m not sure 8G would do it. But, obviously you can configure a PC so it can run their software in real time because they’ve done it.
I built one of those rendering machines over 20 years ago, while drunk, with one hand tied behind my back, over one weekend. You idiots have no idea how easy this is, or how smart I am.
Oh look, Rumpelstucktskin is up to his dopple tricks, thinking he’s funny…
hit your snooze stuck.
” You idiots have no idea how easy this is, or how smart I am.”
One of my thoughts would bust your head wide open.
I just looked up “dilligaf” in in the online dictionary of universal nomenclature. It means “dumbass” in the language of “stupid’. The 2nd definition said: “ass-sniffing troll”. Interesting.
Stubb, it’s a biker patch. It stands for “do I look like I give a fuck”
I don’t know, Ed. Let’s just go bowling. I hear Geritol and Depends are sponsoring some combined events around the country. I know some of the gals from a local quilting club have been attending some of them, so I am sure there will be lots of single gals. Think about it and El Coyote can find us later. I was thinking about staying up late tomorrow night, but I like to be home by the 10 o’clock news if that’s possible.
Hey stubby,
YDKDY!
Ed says: ” You idiots have no idea how easy this is, or how smart I am.”
One of my thoughts would bust your head wide open.
__________________
This coming from someone baited by a dopple….
The video dilligaf posted may not seem important to you but it should. This cartoon world in which we live is becoming more artificial by the day.
There are things coming that will make these sorts of video manipulations seem like the difference between silent films of the twenties and todays special effects blockbusters. Most of the population will buy into it hook, line and sinker.
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
” I know some of the gals from a local quilting club have been attending some of them”
Maybe one of them will embroider me a new DILLIGAF patch. Mine is all grubby from 30 years of road grime.
“This coming from someone baited by a dopple….”
…said the dopple who don’t know a joke when he reads one……
Those CNN jokers took acting lessons from Hogan’s Heroes. Something is going on, we can’t tell you anything but be very afraid. Surre
Even live TV interviews usually have that 2 to 3 second time delay for FCC content purposes–that would appear to be plenty of time for this technology to add facial expressions if it were linked between the on-site record and eventual public feed—might even be advanced enough to paste in whole sentences with different answers/content and then seamlessly rejoin the real interview.
Heck, if Wall Street is using super-speed computers to squeeze in large buy or sell orders before floor orders which would change market prices are posted, then I think the almost instantaneous manipulation of facial expression or even wording is quite possible–and most likely already in use.
Araven – the high platter speed HDs are as expensive as a decent hybrid “Down Under”, and to get best value I shop around. Maybe not surprisingly, I still can find VERY good bargains from the Online retailers based in Tottenham Court Road, London of all places, and Morgan’s Computing did do very good postage deals on the bigger ticket items (Hybrid SSD).
8G DDR3 works just fine for me (with the 4G in the video card) – and we do a fair bit of video editing (HD, using PowerDirector 14); Should the quality (named-brand, not Chinese knock-off) fast ram drop in price, I’m always happy to upgrade! 🙂
I wonder how detectable this process is after the fact.
I’m thinking high profile prosecutions based on video evidence, among other things.
Or read in the “newspaper”:
http://www.naturalnews.com/053609_The_Boston_Globe_hoax_news_Donald_Trump.html
If it is counter intuitive, go with your gut. There is a sucker born every minute. If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. People will lie to you if it profits them.
It has always been thus. God said there is nothing new under the sun.
I wonder if this was initially a DARPA or black project? It’s pretty damned good but still looks a little of to me. Good enough to keep the sheople entertained. That’s the main thing.
I stopped watching MSM newz and infotainment a long time ago. Sight and hearing are only two of many senses I use to detect bullshit.
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