More Real Than Real: A Study on Human Visual Perception of Synthetic Faces [Applications Corner]

Deep fakes have recently become popular. The term refers to doctored media content where one’s face is swapped with someone else’s face or performs someone else’s face movements. In the last couple of years, numerous video clips, often involving celebrities and politicians, have gone viral on social media platforms. This has been enabled by easy-to-use apps capable of processing user-generated content in real time. Although early deep fakes were easy to spot, technology has improved, and whether or not they can fool a human’s visual system is still unknown.