OWR’s audio deepfake technology aces the UK Home Office-led ‘Deepfake Detection Challenge’

 Oxford Wave Research’s audio deepfake detection technology excelled in the Home Office-led ‘Deepfake Detection Challenge’. We topped the competition leader board for audio in the challenge determining which elements of a digital asset are deepfake. The challenge, open to UK companies, universities and researchers, required processing millions of deepfake and real images, audio and video files to build and test deepfake detection technology solutions. The Home Office, The Alan Turing Institute and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology created this challenge and sought to seek out ‘the best of the best’ in innovative solutions to tackle the current and emerging threats presented by the increasing use of deepfakes.

 

We competed in the audio category and were thrilled with our near perfect performance. Along with five other organisations, we were invited to showcase and discuss our solution at the Deepfake Detection Challenge Showcase event at the iconic Ministry of Sound venue in London in July. Our R&D team has been working on voice cloning and audio deepfake detection for several years now, as we believe recent developments in voice cloning will fundamentally impact fraud, terrorism, sexual exploitation, and political disinformation. We were delighted, therefore, that our solution was able to perform so well with the challenge data.

 

We had the privilege of meeting Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Science) with whom we had a very engaging discussion and demonstration of our audio deepfake detection technology. We were very pleased to listen to talks from Rupert Shute (Home Office, Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser), Talitha Rowland (Director, Security & Online Harms, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology), and Professor Jennifer Rubin (Home Office, Chief Scientific Adviser), which highlighted the problems and the need for solutions to combat these threats.

 

We would like to thank Andrew Tyeloo and the Vivace team, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, The Alan Turing Institute, and all those who played a part in putting together this fantastic challenge.

 

For a detailed account of the showcase and the ground-breaking solutions presented, read the full blog here and here (LinkedIn).