Hi!
A bit of background/motivation: Sharing photos of protests can be an important part of the PR of political organizations. However, not everyone feels safe sharing their faces in connection to political organizing. That's why usually, faces are pixellated, or people wear face covering masks (which might be illegal on protests in some juristictions). Pixellated/hidden faces are quite ugly to normies, though, which can reduce the effectiveness of the publication.
So I had this idea: What if instead of pixelating the faces, I run some CV software on the image and all the faces get swapped with the faces of Hedy Lamarr, Diego Luna, or JC Denton. I remember that Snapchat could do live faceswaps with the selfie cam ten years ago, so some desktop software like that shouldn't be too hard to find in 2025, right? /j
Unfortunately, all the stuff I managed to find was some computer science projects in which you train some monster model with one hell of a dataset of each face you want to replace/emplace (which defeats the purpose of anonymizing political activists). Or some obnoxious AI startup which is waaaaay too busy sucking off Elon Musk and/or Sam Altman. I don't want to give my money/data to some doomed AI startup which ends up selling our likenesses to the NSA.
TL;DR: Is there some kind of desktop software which detects faces in an image and swaps them with another face? It's ok if there's only a framework (as long as it's not as bad as all the horrible OpenCV results you find in online tutorials).
Edit: I found something that I can work with
I found a github repo which uses insightface to do the exact job I wanted. I needed to fix the code a bit, but I managed to faceswap the crew of Star Trek TNG on the faces of these protestors who I found on a image search engine:
Bonus - Diego Luna on some stock image:
GL๐ on your AI ~~slop~~ project!๐คญ๐ It missed a few spots!
Where exactly? I couldn't find any missed faces.
I think leaving hair and other features makes it a poor anonymizing tool. The faces may have been altered, but there's still information that can be used my motivated actors to correlate identities.
apparel, keepsakes, skeletal structures, gait, stylometry/graphy, etc.
Even the SIM & IMEI/ESN owners in this picture can be precisely tracked by geolocation of the time the picture was taken, since we know the date&hour of when the protest took place.
True. But depending on how much you pixellate that, those features are still commonlyseen when the faces are blurred.
of hand
Those are faceswapped. (Which shows how effective this is ;)
Check it with the original.
I didโฆ Are you colorblind? I used purple to signify errors.
But those faces were swapped. (E.g.: that's whoppie Goldberg to the far left)