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

TL;DR

This study investigates whether automatic face recognition can verify claims of Melania Trump having a body double, analyzing the effectiveness of different descriptors and image quality metrics in social media misinformation contexts.

Contribution

It evaluates multiple face recognition descriptors and image quality metrics to assess their effectiveness in verifying conspiracy theories involving body doubles.

Findings

Face recognition descriptors vary in accuracy for this task.

Image quality metrics influence face recognition results.

Automatic methods can aid in verifying social media misinformation.

Abstract

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.