Face Swap – How to Replace Your Head in a Photo

Face swap is a photo trend that involves replacing your own head with another person’s in a photograph. This can be done using a variety of apps and online platforms, with Snapchat’s popular face-swapping filters helping fuel the popularity of this meme.

While this feature is popular, there are also potential uses for it in malicious contexts. For example, fraudsters can use face swap to pass video call verification by morphing themselves into someone else, and then answer questions as that other person would.

In terms of technical aspects, face-swapping relies on facial detection and alignment algorithms to find faces in a given image. This is a challenging task, as faces are often poorly aligned due to lighting and pose variations, and it requires a deep learning model with sufficient training data. For this reason, several treatments have been proposed to improve face detection and alignment.

One is to apply normalizing models such as SIFT and SURF to the image, to better match the features of the target face with those of the subject. Another is to use ranking algorithms such as the LASSO to order the candidate images by similarity with the target, and then select them for replacement based on that information.

Some of the best face-swapping apps have pre-loaded celebrity and superhero faces that you can choose from to replace your head in a picture. For example, the app FaceVary has a library of faces that you can swap with, including photos, celebrities, and superheroes from around the world. This free-to-download app offers a basic version that’s easy to use and includes no ads or watermarks, as well as a premium version with more features. face swap