Ananova :
Video technique gets people to mouth sentences they didn't use
A new technique lets video makers make it appear their subjects are mouthing sentences they never spoke.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology taped a woman speaking.
They then reprocessed the footage into a new video showing her mouthing entirely new sentences.
The inventors say the technique could be used in video games and movie special effects to feature dead stars but warn the technology could also be used for fraud and propaganda.
At present it can't generate new audio.
Demetri Terzopoulos, from New York University told the Boston Globe: "This is really groundbreaking work, but we are on a collision course with ethics. If you can make people say things they didn't say, then potentially all hell breaks loose."
Kathleen Hall Jamieson from the University of Pennsylvania added: "There is a certain point at which you raise the level of distrust to where it is hard to communicate through the medium. There are people who still believe the moon landing was staged."
The technique only currently works on a video of a person facing a camera and not moving much, and uses artificial intelligence to teach a machine what a person looks like when they're talking.
The researchers are scheduled to present a paper on their work in July at Siggraph, the world's top computer graphics conference.
A specialist can still detect the video forgeries, but as the technology improves, scientists predict video authentication will become a growing field, in the courts and elsewhere, just like the authentication of photographs.
Story filed: 21:56 Wednesday 15th May 2002 |
