Most Deepfake Videos Have One Glaring Flaw

The rate at which deepfake videos are advancing is both impressive and deeply unsettling. But researchers have described a new method for detecting a "telltale sign" of these manipulated videos, which map one person's face onto the body of another. It's a flaw even the average person would notice: a lack of blinking. Researchers from the University at Albany, SUNY's computer science department recently published a paper titled "In Ictu Oculi: Exposing AI Generated Fake Face Videos by Detecting Eye Blinking." The paper details how they combined two neural networks to more effectively expose synthesized face videos, which often overlook "spontaneous and involuntary physiological activities such as breathing, pulse and eye movement." The researchers note that the mean resting blink rate for humans is 17 blinks per minute, which increases to 26 blinks per minute when someone is talking, and decreases to 4.5 blinks per minute when someone is reading.