Re: [iwar] [fc:At.MIT,.they.can.put.words.in.our.mouths](they already had

From: e.r. (fastflyer28@yahoo.com)
Date: 2002-05-16 08:05:23
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Subject: Re: [iwar] [fc:At.MIT,.they.can.put.words.in.our.mouths](they already had
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 The Director of Industrial Lights and Magic CGI group expressed this concern perhaps three years ago and was published on the matter with a Law Professor(IP specialist), before this matter became a common concern.  
  Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> wrote: At MIT, they can put words in our mouths


By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff, 5/15/2002

CAMBRIDGE - Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have
created the first realistic videos of people saying things they never said -
a scientific leap that raises unsettling questions about falsifying the
moving image. 



In one demonstration, the researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera,
and then reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking
entirely new sentences, and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese, a
language she does not speak. The results were enough to fool viewers
consistently, the researchers report.

The technique's inventors say it could be used in video games and movie
special effects, perhaps reanimating Marilyn Monroe or other dead film stars
with new lines. It could also improve dubbed movies, a lucrative global
industry.

But scientists warn the technology will also provide a powerful new tool for
fraud and propaganda - and will eventually cast doubt on everything from
video surveillance to presidential addresses.

    


''This is really groundbreaking work,'' said Demetri Terzopoulos, a leading
specialist in facial animation who is a professor of computer science and
mathematics at New York University. 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.''

The researchers have already begun testing the technology on video of Ted
Koppel, anchor of ABC's ''Nightline,'' with the aim of dubbing a show in
Spanish, according to Tony F. Ezzat, the graduate student who heads the MIT
team. Yet as this and similar technology makes its way out of academic
laboratories, even the scientists involved see ways it could be misused: to
discredit political dissidents on television, to embarrass people with
fabricated video posted on the Web, or to illegally use trusted figures to
endorse products.

''There is a certain point at which you raise the level of distrust to where
it is hard to communicate through the medium,'' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson,
dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of
Pennsylvania. ''There are people who still believe the moon landing was
staged.''

Currently, the MIT method is limited: It works only on video of a person
facing a camera and not moving much, like a newscaster. The technique only
generates new video, not new audio.

But it should not be difficult to extend the discovery to work on a moving
head at any angle, according to Tomaso Poggio, a neuroscientist at the
McGovern Institute for Brain Research, who is on the MIT team and runs the
lab where the work is being done. And while state-of-the-art audio
simulations are not as convincing as the MIT software, that barrier is
likely to fall soon, researchers say.

''It is only a matter of time before somebody can get enough good video of
your face to have it do what they like,'' said Matthew Brand, a research
scientist at MERL, a Cambridge-based laboratory for Mitsubishi Electric.

For years, animators have used computer technology to put words in people's
mouths, as they do with the talking baby in CBS's ''Baby Bob'' - creating
effects believable enough for entertainment, but still noticeably
computer-generated. The MIT technology is the first that is
''video-realistic,'' the researchers say, meaning volunteers in a laboratory
test could not distinguish between real and synthesized clips. And while
current computer-animation techniques require an artist to smooth out
trouble spots by hand, the MIT method is almost entirely automated.

Previous work has focused on creating a virtual model of a person's mouth,
then using a computer to render digital images of it as it moves. But the
new software relies on an ingenious application of artificial intelligence
to teach a machine what a person looks like when talking.

Starting with between two and four minutes of video - the minimum needed for
the effect to work - the computer captures images which represent the full
range of motion of the mouth and surrounding areas, Ezzat said.

The computer is able to express any face as a combination of these faces (46
in one example), the same way that any color can be represented by a
combination of red, green, and blue. The computer then goes through the
video, learning how a person expresses every sound, and how it moves from
one to the next.

Given a new sound, the computer can then generate an accurate picture of the
mouth area and virtually superimpose it on the person's face, according to a
paper describing the work. The researchers are scheduled to present the
paper in July at Siggraph, the world's top computer graphics conference.

The effect is significantly more convincing than a previous effort, called
Video Rewrite, which recorded a huge number of small snippets of video and
then recombined them. Still, the new method only seems lifelike for a
sentence or two at a time, because over longer stretches, the speaker seems
to lack emotion.

MIT's Ezzat said that he would like to develop a more complex model that
would teach the computer to simulate basic emotions.

A specialist can still detect the video forgeries, but as the technology
improves, scientists predict that video authentication will become a growing
field - in the courts and elsewhere - just like the authentication of
photographs. As video, too, becomes malleable, a society increasingly
reliant on live satellite feeds and fiber optics will have to find even more
direct ways to communicate.

''We will probably have to revert to a method common in the Middle Ages,
which is eyewitness testimony,'' said the University of Pennsylvania's
Jamieson. ''And there is probably something healthy in that.''


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