CHANDIGARH: The Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar along with Australia-based Monash University has developed a unique detector to find out if imposters are attending virtual conferences in the new normal amid the Covid pandemic.
'FakeBuster' helps find faces manipulated on social media to defame or make jokes and even enables users to detect if a video of another person is spoofed during a video meet.
The tool is independent of video conferencing solutions and has been tested on Zoom an Skype applications.
A paper on this technique titled, FakeBuster: A Deepfakes detection tool for video conferencing scenarios, was presented at the 26th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in USA.
The application has been developed by a four-member team of researchers.
"Sophisticated artificial intelligence techniques have spurred a dramatic increase in manipulation of media contents. Such techniques keep evolving and become more realistic making detection all the more difficult," Dr Abhinav Dhall, one of the team members said.
He further added that the usage of manipulated media content in spreading fake news, pornography and other such online content has been widely observed with major repercussions. He said such manipulations have recently found their way into video-calling platforms through spoofing tools based on transfer of facial expressions. These fake facial expressions are often convincing to human eye and can have serious implications. These real time mimicked visuals (videos) known as `Deepfakes’ can even be used during online examinations and job interviews.
"The Deepfake detection tool ‘FakeBuster’ works in both online and offline modes. Since the device can presently be attached with laptops and desktops only, we are aiming to make the network smaller and lighter to enable it to run on mobile phones and devices as well,’’ says Prof Ramanathan Subramanian and added that the team is working on using the device to detect fake audios also.
Besides Dhall and Subramanian the other team members are two students Vineet Mehta and Parul Gupta.
The team claims that ‘FakeBuster’ is one of the first tools to detect imposters during video conferencing using DeepFake detection technology. The device has already been tested and would hit the market soon.