Copycatch

Mayank Vatsa has created a software tool to help people spot a sculpted selfie, a tampered profile picture on Facebook, or a manipulated photograph on a matrimonial website - a tool superior to human eyes. Vatsa, associate professor of computer science at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, is using artificial intelligence technology, called deep learning, to detect retouching or digital alteration of facial images. Computer science researchers view deep learning as an advance of machine learning that uses software to model high-level abstract information hidden in large volumes of data. Deep learning algorithms, which use data to look for patterns, have already been shown to outperform humans in tasks such as image, text, and voice recognition. "Deep learning has the ability to take in huge amounts of data - in fact, it needs the huge amounts of data to function at all - and make sense of it," said a computer vision expert who has been involved in deep learning techniques for automatic predictions of human facial expressions.