The availability of large-scale facial databases, together with the remarkable progresses of deep learning technologies, in particular Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have led to the generation of extremely realistic fake facial content, which raises obvious concerns about the potential for misuse. These concerns have fostered the research of manipulation detection methods that, contrary to humans, have already achieved astonishing results in some scenarios. In this study, we focus on the entire face synthesis, which is one specific type of facial manipulation. The main contributions of this study are: i) a novel strategy to remove GAN "fingerprints" from synthetic fake images in order to spoof facial manipulation detection systems, while keeping the visual quality of the resulting images, ii) an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art detection approaches for the entire face synthesis manipulation, iii) a complete experimental assessment of this type of facial manipulation considering state-of-the-art detection systems, remarking how challenging is this task in unconstrained scenarios, and finally iv) a novel public database named FSRemovalDB produced after applying our proposed GAN-fingerprint removal approach to original synthetic fake images. The observed results led us to conclude that more efforts are required to develop robust facial manipulation detection systems against unseen conditions and spoof techniques such as the one proposed in this study.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that is normally used within financial applications, however it can be very beneficial also in certain robotic contexts, such as when an immutable register of events is required. Among the several properties of Blockchain that can be useful within robotic environments, we find not just immutability but also decentralization of the data, irreversibility, accessibility and non-repudiation. In this paper, we propose an architecture that uses blockchain as a ledger and smart-contract technology for robotic control by using external parties, Oracles, to process data. We show how to register events in a secure way, how it is possible to use smart-contracts to control robots and how to interface with external Artificial Intelligence algorithms for image analysis. The proposed architecture is modular and can be used in multiple contexts such as in manufacturing, network control, robot control, and others, since it is easy to integrate, adapt, maintain and extend to new domains.
Blockchain technology is growing everyday at a fast-passed rhythm and it's possible to integrate it with many systems, namely Robotics with AI services. However, this is still a recent field and there isn't yet a clear understanding of what it could potentially become. In this paper, we conduct an overview of many different methods and platforms that try to leverage the power of blockchain into robotic systems, to improve AI services or to solve problems that are present in the major blockchains, which can lead to the ability of creating robotic systems with increased capabilities and security. We present an overview, discuss the methods and conclude the paper with our view on the future of the integration of these technologies.