Brian Krebs: Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I’d never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices. Apparently, I’m not alone. “I believe this is the first time I’ve seen a camera on a gas pump with a Bluetooth card skimmer,” said Detective Matt Jogodka of the Las Vegas Police Department, referring to the compromised fuel pump pictured here.

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It may be difficult to tell, but the horizontal bar across the top of the machine (just above the ‘This Sale $’ indicator) contains a hidden pinhole camera angled so as to record debit card users entering their PIN.

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Source: Slashdot – Hidden Cam Above Bluetooth Pump Skimmer

What if you could manipulate the facial features of a historical figure, a politician, or a CEO realistically and convincingly using nothing but a webcam and an illustrated or photographic still image? From a report: A tool called MarioNETte that was recently developed by researchers at Seoul-based Hyperconnect accomplishes this, thanks in part to cutting-edge machine learning techniques. The researchers claim it outperforms all baselines even where there’s “significant” mismatch between the face to be manipulated and the person doing the manipulating. MarioNETte is technically a face reenactment tool, in that it aims to synthesize a reenacted face animated by the movement of a person (a “driver”) while preserving the face’s (target’s) appearance. It’s not a new idea, but previous approaches either (1) required a few minutes of training data and could only reenact predefined targets, or (2) would distort the target’s features when dealing with large poses.

MarioNETte advances the state of the art by incorporating three novel components: an image attention block, a target feature alignment, and a landmark transformer. The attention block allows the model to attend to relevant positions of mapped physical features, while the target feature alignment mitigates artifacts, warping, and distortion. As for the landmark transformer bit, it adapts the geometry of the driver’s poses to that of the target without the need for labeled data, in contrast to approaches that require human-annotated examples. The researchers trained and tested MarioNETte using VoxCeleb1 and CelebV, two open source corpora of celebrity photos and videos.

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Source: Slashdot – Researchers Train AI To Map a Person’s Facial Movements To Any Target Headshot