Adobe Reveals AI Tool to Detect Photoshopped Faces

Image Manipulation Software Tools and Photoshop are in great use to edit faces in Photos. Editing has been a common practice these days.  Adobe researchers collaborated with Berkeley and found an AI Tool which can detect the Photoshopped face and even Undo it. The Tool can identify fake images which a naked eye cannot especially in case of doctored deep fake videos.

This Project is applicable to the ones done using Photoshop Manipulations that too made with “Face Aware Liquify Feature”. Through this feature, you can have major adjustments to most of the facial features. Moreover, you can literally turn a person appear smiling even when they are actually not smiling. However, a universal detection tool is expected in the long run and this is just the beginning.

Adobe’s Richard Zhang who worked on the project says “We live in a world where it’s becoming harder to trust the digital information we consume, and I look forward to further exploring this area of research.”

Deep Fake Videos

Deep Fake Videos involve deep learning a form of artificial intelligence used to create fake videos. These Videos are usually made by feeding computer an algorithm or set of instructions along with lots of images, audio of the target person. Thus, the Computer Program will learn how to imitate the person’s mannerisms, voice and facial expressions.

In fact, if you have adequate video and audio of some person you can let them say anything of your choice through this.

Adobe mentioned in one of its blog posts “While we are proud of the impact that Photoshop and Adobe’s other creative tools have made on the world, we also recognize the ethical implications of our technology.”

According to Researchers, this AI tool is to detect facial edits. In the future, they are trying to develop tools which can identify complex changes like body manipulations, photometric edits like skin smoothing. Adobe’s Execution to detect facial manipulations came after Mark Zuckerberg and Nancy Pelosi videos became viral on Social Media.

Gavin Miller believes that inspite of technologies like this People should know that content can be modified. This can be done most of the times to delight them and at times even to mislead them.

As Fake Visual Content is becoming quite common, the Company took this decision so that everyone can understand image forensics. The Company mentioned in one of its blog posts that the broader efforts across the Adobe are to detect audio, video, image, document manipulations.

Convolutional Neural Network

As a part of this, the team introduced a Convolutional Neural Network which can spot the changes made with Adobe’s “Face Aware Liquify Feature.” This feature initially came into existence to alter the facial features like mouth and eyes.

The team built the AI System by training the AI using thousands of fake images. Researchers took some random pictures from the internet and applied face aware liquify feature. They trained the AI in a way to identify whether an image is manipulated or not.

On testing, it is found that the human eye can recognise altered face 53% whereas the tool can do it as high as 99%. The tool even identified methods of facial warping as well as Specific Areas which a human eye can’t. It even gave information about the methods used to alter facial features. After research, the AI System built found manipulation more accurate compared to the human eye.

This AI tool searches for the tiny patterns in the optical flow of the images which a naked eye can’t perceive. These small tiny patterns can let you know the manipulations exactly made so that you can undo them.

Although, the Tool seems to be promising the tools like this can’t halt the harmful effects of Media. Even though the content is fake it will still become viral on Social Media. Identifying something fake is only half the battle but this can be a counter to such false and fake videos.

We may not realise the importance of AI as of now but will know the huge impact it’s gonna create in mere future. Technology has made it quite easy to fake videos and images with unbelievable quality. Hoping, that AI could counter atleast when it comes to fake images and Videos.