Modeling and Mapping Location-Dependent Human Appearance

Human appearance is highly variable and depends on individual preferences, such as fashion, facial expression, and makeup. These preferences depend on many factors including a person\u27s sense of style, what they are doing, and the weather. These factors, in turn, are dependent upon geographic location and time. In our work, we build computational models to learn the relationship between human appearance, geographic location, and time. The primary contributions are a framework for collecting and processing geotagged imagery of people, a large dataset collected by our framework, and several generative and discriminative models that use our dataset to learn the relationship between human appearance, location, and time. Additionally, we build interactive maps that allow for inspection and demonstration of what our models have learned

Presentation Attack Detection in Facial Biometric Authentication

Biometric systems are referred to those structures that enable recognizing an individual, or specifically a characteristic, using biometric data and mathematical algorithms. These are known to be widely employed in various organizations and companies, mostly as authentication systems. Biometric authentic systems are usually much more secure than a classic one, however they also have some loopholes. Presentation attacks indicate those attacks which spoof the biometric systems or sensors. The presentation attacks covered in this project are: photo attacks and deepfake attacks. In the case of photo attacks, it is observed that interactive action check like Eye Blinking proves efficient in detecting liveness. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model trained on the dataset gave 95% accuracy. In the case of deepfake attacks, it is found out that the deepfake videos and photos are generated by complex Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and are difficult for human eye to figure out. However, through experiments, it was observed that comprehensive analysis on the frequency domain divulges a lot of vulnerabilities in the GAN generated images. This makes it easier to separate these fake face images from real live faces. The project documents that with frequency analysis, simple linear models as well as complex models give high accuracy results. The models are trained on StyleGAN generated fake images, Flickr-Faces-HQ Dataset and Reface app generated video dataset. Logistic Regression turns out to be the best classifier with test accuracies of 99.67% and 97.96% on two different datasets. Future research can be conducted on different types of presentation attacks like using video, 3-D rendered face mask or advanced GAN generated deepfakes

Facial re-enactment, speech synthesis and the rise of the Deepfake

Emergent technologies in the fields of audio speech synthesis and video facial manipulation have the potential to drastically impact our societal patterns of multimedia consumption. At a time when social media and internet culture is plagued by misinformation, propaganda and “fake news”, their latent misuse represents a possible looming threat to fragile systems of information sharing and social democratic discourse. It has thus become increasingly recognised in both academic and mainstream journalism that the ramifications of these tools must be examined to determine what they are and how their widespread availability can be managed. This research project seeks to examine four emerging software programs – Face2Face, FakeApp , Adobe VoCo and Lyrebird – that are designed to facilitate the synthesis of speech and manipulate facial features in videos. I will explore their positive industry applications and the potentially negative consequences of their release into the public domain. Consideration will be directed to how such consequences and risks can be ameliorated through detection, regulation and education. A final analysis of these three competing threads will then attempt to address whether the practical and commercial applications of these technologies are outweighed by the inherent unethical or illegal uses they engender, and if so; what we can do in response