DeepNude is now popular. Let's take a look at the secret of the one-click undressing AI principle

Input a photo of a woman and you will get a nude photo. The stripping DeepNude became popular. However, due to the huge ethical controversy, the developer of this software chose to remove it from the shelves.

Moreover, DeepNude itself is not open source. We only know from sporadic introductions from developers that it uses pix2pix.

Driven by a huge desire for knowledge, Yuan Xiao, a master's student from the School of Computer Science at Sichuan University, explored the principles behind DeepNude on his GitHub and studied technologies and papers related to image generation and image restoration.

According to his analysis, DeepNude is actually just "standing on the shoulders of giants". The technologies used in it are all major research results in the CV field in the past two years, and they have all been open source.

Of course, the author himself is critical of this technology.

principle

DeepNude mainly uses the image-to-image technology proposed in the 2018 article "Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions".

It can turn simple drawings into colorful images. Interested students can go to the Demo website to try it out in the browser.

Specifically, DeepNude mainly uses three technologies in the field of computer vision.

1. Image restoration

That is the article mentioned above, which is a study published in 2018 by a team led by Guilin Liu et al. from NVIDIA.

When the picture is severely smeared, the model can still restore the "original" image, which can be said to be "without any trace of PS."

In addition to repairing damaged images, Image Inpainting can also remove certain objects from the image, such as painting stones in the grass so that there will be no stones in the restored image.

DeepNude used it to remove the clothes in the picture.

2、Pix2Pix

This is a 2017 paper from UC Berkeley that uses conditional adversarial networks as a general solution to the image-to-image translation problem.

From semantic segmentation to original images, from black and white to color, completing simple drawings, etc., Pix2Pix can do almost everything.

3、CycleGAN

This is Zhu Junyan's doctoral thesis, which won the 2018 ACM SIGGRAPH Best Doctoral Dissertation Award.

CycleGAN uses a cycle consistency loss function to achieve training without the need for paired data. In other words, it can translate from one domain to another without a one-to-one mapping between the source and target domains. This opens up the possibility of performing many interesting tasks such as photo enhancement, image colorization, style transfer, etc. All you need is the source and target datasets.

It can transform between a regular horse and a zebra, and can also change a summer scene into a winter scene.

The codes of the above three tools have been open sourced.

DeepNude Files

All the files in the DeepNude software package are as follows:

Yuan Xiao believes that DeepNude still has some shortcomings that can be improved:

1. The software is too large: the size of a pyqtlib.rar file is as high as 1.9GB.

2. Slow conversion speed: It takes 30 seconds to process one picture;

3. The content is disrespectful to women: This is a wrong use of deep learning technology

He believes that DeepNude can be implemented using TensorFlow to compress the size of the model. The software itself should also change its current practice of disrespecting women and use this technology in the right way. Researchers should strive to benefit mankind instead of earning income through illegal software.

Seeding site

Although Yuan Xiao's wish was good, the discussion page of this project inevitably became a site for requests for seeds.

As DeepNude is removed from the shelves, some people hope that the author can provide the download address of the original software, or provide some codes.

Of course the author rejected it outright, not only because of moral issues, but also because it is illegal to distribute pornographic software in China.

Finally, let me share the latest news: another "shy" software has also been deemed illegal. That is the Deepfake software that can replace the heroine of a romantic action movie with any goddess.

In Virginia, USA, creating false nude images or videos without the consent of the person is considered a crime and can be punished by fines or even imprisonment.