Real, fake and synthetic faces -- does the coin have three sides?

With the ever-growing power of generative artificial intelligence, deepfake and artificially generated (synthetic) media have continued to spread online, which creates various ethical and moral concerns regarding their usage. To tackle this, we thus present a novel exploration of the trends and patterns observed in real, deepfake and synthetic facial images. The proposed analysis is done in two parts: firstly, we incorporate eight deep learning models and analyze their performances in distinguishing between the three classes of images. Next, we look to further delve into the similarities and differences between these three sets of images by investigating their image properties both in the context of the entire image as well as in the context of specific regions within the image. ANOVA test was also performed and provided further clarity amongst the patterns associated between the images of the three classes. From our findings, we observe that the investigated deeplearning models found it easier to detect synthetic facial images, with the ViT Patch-16 model performing best on this task with a class-averaged sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy of 97.37%, 98.69%, 97.48%, and 98.25%, respectively. This observation was supported by further analysis of various image properties. We saw noticeable differences across the three category of images. This analysis can help us build better algorithms for facial image generation, and also shows that synthetic, deepfake and real face images are indeed three different classes.

Generation and Detection of Sign Language Deepfakes -- A Linguistic and Visual Analysis

A question in the realm of deepfakes is slowly emerging pertaining to whether we can go beyond facial deepfakes and whether it would be beneficial to society. Therefore, this research presents a positive application of deepfake technology in upper body generation, while performing sign-language for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHoH) community. The resulting videos are later vetted with a sign language expert. This is particularly helpful, given the intricate nature of sign language, a scarcity of sign language experts, and potential benefits for health and education. The objectives of this work encompass constructing a reliable deepfake dataset, evaluating its technical and visual credibility through computer vision and natural language processing models, and assessing the plausibility of the generated content. With over 1200 videos, featuring both previously seen and unseen individuals for the generation model, using the help of a sign language expert, we establish a deepfake dataset in sign language that can further be utilized to detect fake videos that may target certain people of determination.

GTA-HDR: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for HDR Image Reconstruction

High Dynamic Range (HDR) content (i.e., images and videos) has a broad range of applications. However, capturing HDR content from real-world scenes is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, the challenging task of reconstructing visually accurate HDR images from their Low Dynamic Range (LDR) counterparts is gaining attention in the vision research community. A major challenge in this research problem is the lack of datasets, which capture diverse scene conditions (e.g., lighting, shadows, weather, locations, landscapes, objects, humans, buildings) and various image features (e.g., color, contrast, saturation, hue, luminance, brightness, radiance). To address this gap, in this paper, we introduce GTA-HDR, a large-scale synthetic dataset of photo-realistic HDR images sampled from the GTA-V video game. We perform thorough evaluation of the proposed dataset, which demonstrates significant qualitative and quantitative improvements of the state-of-the-art HDR image reconstruction methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset and its impact on additional computer vision tasks including 3D human pose estimation, human body part segmentation, and holistic scene segmentation. The dataset, data collection pipeline, and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/HrishavBakulBarua/GTA-HDR.

HistoHDR-Net: Histogram Equalization for Single LDR to HDR Image Translation

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging aims to replicate the high visual quality and clarity of real-world scenes. Due to the high costs associated with HDR imaging, the literature offers various data-driven methods for HDR image reconstruction from Low Dynamic Range (LDR) counterparts. A common limitation of these approaches is missing details in regions of the reconstructed HDR images, which are over- or under-exposed in the input LDR images. To this end, we propose a simple and effective method, HistoHDR-Net, to recover the fine details (e.g., color, contrast, saturation, and brightness) of HDR images via a fusion-based approach utilizing histogram-equalized LDR images along with self-attention guidance. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach over the state-of-art methods.

DiffAugment: Diffusion based Long-Tailed Visual Relationship Recognition

The task of Visual Relationship Recognition (VRR) aims to identify relationships between two interacting objects in an image and is particularly challenging due to the widely-spread and highly imbalanced distribution of <subject, relation, object> triplets. To overcome the resultant performance bias in existing VRR approaches, we introduce DiffAugment -- a method which first augments the tail classes in the linguistic space by making use of WordNet and then utilizes the generative prowess of Diffusion Models to expand the visual space for minority classes. We propose a novel hardness-aware component in diffusion which is based upon the hardness of each <S,R,O> triplet and demonstrate the effectiveness of hardness-aware diffusion in generating visual embeddings for the tail classes. We also propose a novel subject and object based seeding strategy for diffusion sampling which improves the discriminative capability of the generated visual embeddings. Extensive experimentation on the GQA-LT dataset shows favorable gains in the subject/object and relation average per-class accuracy using Diffusion augmented samples.

AV-Deepfake1M: A Large-Scale LLM-Driven Audio-Visual Deepfake Dataset

The detection and localization of highly realistic deepfake audio-visual content are challenging even for the most advanced state-of-the-art methods. While most of the research efforts in this domain are focused on detecting high-quality deepfake images and videos, only a few works address the problem of the localization of small segments of audio-visual manipulations embedded in real videos. In this research, we emulate the process of such content generation and propose the AV-Deepfake1M dataset. The dataset contains content-driven (i) video manipulations, (ii) audio manipulations, and (iii) audio-visual manipulations for more than 2K subjects resulting in a total of more than 1M videos. The paper provides a thorough description of the proposed data generation pipeline accompanied by a rigorous analysis of the quality of the generated data. The comprehensive benchmark of the proposed dataset utilizing state-of-the-art deepfake detection and localization methods indicates a significant drop in performance compared to previous datasets. The proposed dataset will play a vital role in building the next-generation deepfake localization methods. The dataset and associated code are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/AV-Deepfake1M .

MAGIC-TBR: Multiview Attention Fusion for Transformer-based Bodily Behavior Recognition in Group Settings

Bodily behavioral language is an important social cue, and its automated analysis helps in enhancing the understanding of artificial intelligence systems. Furthermore, behavioral language cues are essential for active engagement in social agent-based user interactions. Despite the progress made in computer vision for tasks like head and body pose estimation, there is still a need to explore the detection of finer behaviors such as gesturing, grooming, or fumbling. This paper proposes a multiview attention fusion method named MAGIC-TBR that combines features extracted from videos and their corresponding Discrete Cosine Transform coefficients via a transformer-based approach. The experiments are conducted on the BBSI dataset and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed feature fusion with multiview attention. The code is available at: https://github.com/surbhimadan92/MAGIC-TBR

ArtHDR-Net: Perceptually Realistic and Accurate HDR Content Creation

High Dynamic Range (HDR) content creation has become an important topic for modern media and entertainment sectors, gaming and Augmented/Virtual Reality industries. Many methods have been proposed to recreate the HDR counterparts of input Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images/videos given a single exposure or multi-exposure LDRs. The state-of-the-art methods focus primarily on the preservation of the reconstruction's structural similarity and the pixel-wise accuracy. However, these conventional approaches do not emphasize preserving the artistic intent of the images in terms of human visual perception, which is an essential element in media, entertainment and gaming. In this paper, we attempt to study and fill this gap. We propose an architecture called ArtHDR-Net based on a Convolutional Neural Network that uses multi-exposed LDR features as input. Experimental results show that ArtHDR-Net can achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of the HDR-VDP-2 score (i.e., mean opinion score index) while reaching competitive performance in terms of PSNR and SSIM.

Pavlok-Nudge: A Feedback Mechanism for Atomic Behaviour Modification with Snoring Usecase

This paper proposes a feedback mechanism to 'break bad habits' using the Pavlok device. Pavlok utilises beeps, vibration and shocks as a mode of aversion technique to help individuals with behaviour modification. While the device can be useful in certain periodic daily life situations, like alarms and exercise notifications, the device relies on manual operations that limit its usage. To this end, we design a user interface to generate an automatic feedback mechanism that integrates Pavlok and a deep learning based model to detect certain behaviours via an integrated user interface i.e. mobile or desktop application. Our proposed solution is implemented and verified in the context of snoring, which first detects audio from the environment following a prediction of whether the audio content is a snore or not. Based on the prediction of the deep learning model, we use Pavlok to alert users for preventive measures. We believe that this simple solution can help people to change their atomic habits, which may lead to long-term benefits.

"Glitch in the Matrix!": A Large Scale Benchmark for Content Driven Audio-Visual Forgery Detection and Localization

Most deepfake detection methods focus on detecting spatial and/or spatio-temporal changes in facial attributes. This is because available benchmark datasets contain mostly visual-only modifications. However, a sophisticated deepfake may include small segments of audio or audio-visual manipulations that can completely change the meaning of the content. To addresses this gap, we propose and benchmark a new dataset, Localized Audio Visual DeepFake (LAV-DF), consisting of strategic content-driven audio, visual and audio-visual manipulations. The proposed baseline method, Boundary Aware Temporal Forgery Detection (BA-TFD), is a 3D Convolutional Neural Network-based architecture which efficiently captures multimodal manipulations. We further improve (i.e. BA-TFD+) the baseline method by replacing the backbone with a Multiscale Vision Transformer and guide the training process with contrastive, frame classification, boundary matching and multimodal boundary matching loss functions. The quantitative analysis demonstrates the superiority of BA- TFD+ on temporal forgery localization and deepfake detection tasks using several benchmark datasets including our newly proposed dataset. The dataset, models and code are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/LAV-DF.