Fighting synthetic realities

• Grant number: 22/12201-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: April 01, 2023
• End date: September 30, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Anderson de Rezende Rocha
• Grantee: Anderson de Rezende Rocha
• Host Investigator: Sebastien Marcel
• Host Institution: Instituto de Computação (IC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland
• Associated research grant: 17/12646-3 - Déjà vu: feature-space-time coherence from heterogeneous data for media integrity analytics and interpretation of events, AP.TEM

Abstract

Digital media is the dominant form of communication in modern society but manipulating these multimedia assets can easily be done with simple and inexpensive tools. Moreover, credible manipulations can be used to fabricate more believable multimedia stories than those relying on text alone. Although falsified media is not a new phenomenon, social media has been effectively used to distribute falsified media at scale. In this context, we are witnessing the birth of what we refer to as Synthetic Realities shaping and shifting our reality into deceptive ones. Among many different forms of synthetic realities, in this project, we focus on studying two key problems: deepfakes and spoofing detection. Other forms of synthetic realities are of interest for the near future in a larger multi-partner project include fake news detection, forgery detection in multimedia assets, authorship attribution, fact-checking, and multimedia provenance/phylogeny. In this project, we will study new approaches to incorporate context when detecting falsifications in digital objects, more specifically forgeries involved human subjects so that we can restore people's trust on multimedia assets. (AU)