Avatar Fingerprinting for Authorized Use of Synthetic Talking-Head Videos

Understand

Modern avatar generators allow anyone to synthesize photorealistic real-time talking avatars, ushering in a new era of avatar-based human communication, such as with immersive AR/VR interactions or videoconferencing with limited bandwidths.

• Their safe adoption, however, requires a mechanism to verify if the rendered avatar is trustworthy: does it use the appearance of an individual without their consent? We term this task avatar fingerprinting.
• To tackle it, we first introduce a large-scale dataset of real and synthetic videos of people interacting on a video call, where the synthetic videos are generated using the facial appearance of one person and the expressions of another.
• We verify the identity driving the expressions in a synthetic video, by learning motion signatures that are independent of the facial appearance shown.