London, June 02: It's virtually a face off!
Scientists have developed a software which they claim
can change the sex of a person on a computer by taking a live
video feed of a person talking.
The software has been developed by computer scientist
Barry-John Theobald at the University of East Anglia in the UK
and Iain Matthews, formerly at Carnegie Mellon University and
now at Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand.
In fact, according to the scientists, the software can
take a live video feed of a person talking and make them look
and sound like somebody else could actually change that, the
'New Scientist' reported.
In their research, the scientists recorded video of
volunteers performing 30 different facial expressions such as
frowning, smiling and looking surprised. For each expression,
the positions of key facial features, such as the eyes, nose
and corners of the lips, were manually labelled.
That annotated footage was used to "train" software
to recognise the face of each individual featured in the set.
Once trained on a person in this way, it can closely track
every move of their face in video footage.
Those movements can then be transferred onto the face
of another "known" person by calculating how the recipient's
features need to change to take on each new expression.
Doing that and displaying the transformed face takes
just 150 milliseconds, fast enough to allow a conversation
over video link to continue in real time. To complete effect,
a person's voice can be manipulated to match their new face.
Volunteers were asked to chat to one another in a
video conference, but did not know if the face they saw was
really that of the person they were talking with – or indeed
if the other volunteer was seeing their own true face.
"The results suggest that our body language during
conversation is more reactive to that of others than it is
to their physical appearance. We've shown you can present a
female as herself or as a male, and the other participant's
behaviour doesn't change," Theobald said.
Bureau Report
First Published: Tuesday, June 02, 2009, 17:39