‘Synthesizing Obama’ tech to feature at SIGGRAPH
Apple kills iPod Nano, Shuffle
LOS ANGELES, July 29, (RTRS): A paper set to be delivered at next week’s SIGGRAPH 2017 conference has garnered a lot of pre-confab attention because the technology could possibly be used to produce fake news videos. But the technology described in the paper, “Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync From Audio,” could have many more beneficial uses, especially in the entertainment and gaming industries.
Researchers from the University of Washington have developed the technology to photorealistically put different words into former President Barack Obama’s mouth, based on several hours of video footage from his weekly addresses. They used a recurrent neural network to study how Obama’s mouth moves, then they manipulated his mouth and head motions as to sync them to rearranged words and sentences, creating new sentences.
It’s easy to see how this could potentially be used for nefarious purposes, but the technology is a long way away from becoming widely available and it would be fairly easy to detect in fake videos, according to Supasorn Suwajanakorn, the lead author of the study. “It would be relatively easy to develop a software to detect fake video,” he says. “Producing a truly realistic, hard-toverify video may take much longer than that due to technical limitations.”
SIGGRAPH’s conference chair Jerome Solomon, dean of Cogswell Polytechnical College, notes that any new technology can be used for good or bad. “This is new technology in computer graphics,” he explains. “We’re making things that might not be believable believable and worlds that don’t exist exist. And I think people potentially using any technology out of our industry could use it for bad purposes or good.”
Plus, Solomon says echoing Suwajanakorn, “I think it’s a ways away from being available to everybody. Our conference is really a place where new technology comes in through our technical papers program, but it takes awhile for the technology to appear in the tools. Developers have to go and create the software to actually take this research and get it into the tools.”
And there are a wide variety of uses for this particular technology.
“Automatically editing video to allow accurate lip-sync to a new audio track is a novel advance on a very hot topic with many practical applications,” says Marie-Paule Cani,SIGGRAPH’s technical paper chair. “It could be used, for instance, to seamlessly dub a movie in a foreign language, or to correct what people said in video footage and no cost.” A number of papers and exhibits of new technology will be on display at SIGGRAPH 2017, to be held July 30 through Aug. 3 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Also: SAN FRANCISCO: Apple Inc said Thursday that it will discontinue the iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano, the last two music players in the company’s lineup that cannot play songs from Apple Music, its streaming service that competes with Spotify and Pandora Media Inc.
The two devices are the direct descendants of the original iPod introduced by then-CEO Steve Jobs in 2001, widely seen as putting Apple on the eventual path toward the iPhone. They can only play songs that have been downloaded from iTunes or from physical media such as CD.
Apple said the new iPod line will consist of two models of the iPod Touch ranging form $199 to $299 depending on storage capacity. The iPod Touch is essentially an iPhone without mobile data service and runs iOS, the same operating system as iPhones and iPads.