Hi!
A bit of background/motivation: Sharing photos of protests can be an important part of the PR of political organizations. However, not everyone feels safe sharing their faces in connection to political organizing. That's why usually, faces are pixellated, or people wear face covering masks (which might be illegal on protests in some juristictions). Pixellated/hidden faces are quite ugly to normies, though, which can reduce the effectiveness of the publication.
So I had this idea: What if instead of pixelating the faces, I run some CV software on the image and all the faces get swapped with the faces of Hedy Lamarr, Diego Luna, or JC Denton. I remember that Snapchat could do live faceswaps with the selfie cam ten years ago, so some desktop software like that shouldn't be too hard to find in 2025, right? /j
Unfortunately, all the stuff I managed to find was some computer science projects in which you train some monster model with one hell of a dataset of each face you want to replace/emplace (which defeats the purpose of anonymizing political activists). Or some obnoxious AI startup which is waaaaay too busy sucking off Elon Musk and/or Sam Altman. I don't want to give my money/data to some doomed AI startup which ends up selling our likenesses to the NSA.
TL;DR: Is there some kind of desktop software which detects faces in an image and swaps them with another face? It's ok if there's only a framework (as long as it's not as bad as all the horrible OpenCV results you find in online tutorials).
Edit: I found something that I can work with
You can also just literally edit in any mask you want on photos. E.g. Stephen St. Clair@wsws.org posted this candid of protestors on August 28th against the genocide in Gaza:
And he could have protected them more than Laurence B. Alexander did hiring saboteurs, e.g.:
But always be mindful about of authoritarians hiring saboteurs at any protest. Lemmy thread discussing this.
I was hoping for some more automated and clean looking solution. But thanks anyway.