Does Melania Trump have a body double from the perspective of automatic face recognition?

Khawla Mallat, Fabiola Becerra-Riera, Annette Morales-González, Heydi Méndez-Vázquez, Jean-Luc Dugelay

Published 2021-09-06Version 1

In this paper, we explore whether automatic face recognition can help in verifying widespread misinformation on social media, particularly conspiracy theories that are based on the existence of body doubles. The conspiracy theory addressed in this paper is the case of the Melania Trump body double. We employed four different state-of-the-art descriptors for face recognition to verify the integrity of the claim of the studied conspiracy theory. In addition, we assessed the impact of different image quality metrics on the variation of face recognition results. Two sets of image quality metrics were considered: acquisition-related metrics and subject-related metrics.