FACELESS
Real-time face swapping, engineered for speed and consent.
An open-source GPU face-swap engine that runs a live camera feed through a CUDA pipeline at roughly 30fps and outputs to a virtual camera for OBS, Zoom, or Discord. Built for VFX, streaming, VTubing, privacy, and research — with the people on screen on board.
From Source Face to Virtual Camera
FACELESS runs a four-stage, multi-threaded pipeline on the GPU. You provide a consented source image; the engine detects, swaps, enhances, and streams the result in real time.
What's Under the Hood
Every component is built around the real-time pipeline — GPU inference, decoupled architecture, and fine-grained control over the output.
The Resolution-Decoupled Pipeline
The core trick: the swap model only ever sees a 128×128 face, no matter the input size. So FACELESS deliberately decouples capture, processing, and output resolutions instead of forcing every stage to run at 1080p.
1920×1080 @ 30fps
854×480 • detect + swap
inswapper_128 internal
upscaled • composited
Running detection and warping at 480p instead of 1080p eliminates the single biggest cost — CPU-side affine warping — while the 128px swap model produces identical results either way. The result composites back to a full 1080p frame. That's how FACELESS holds real-time framerates on consumer GPUs where a naive full-res pipeline would crawl at ~10fps.
Every Millisecond Accounted For
Benchmarked on an RTX GPU with 1080p webcam input. Numbers below are real measurements from the project README — not marketing maxima.
Ethics, Consent & Legal
Face-swapping is powerful and easy to misuse. FACELESS is built and shared for legitimate, consensual use only. Using it does not make any output lawful or ethical — that responsibility is yours. The rules below are not optional fine print.
Legitimate Uses YES
- VFX, film, and animation pre-visualization
- Live streaming and VTubing with your own or a consenting performer's likeness
- Personal privacy — masking your own face on calls or recordings
- Research, education, and detection / forensics work
- Consensual fun among people who have all agreed to take part
Never Permitted NO
- Swapping anyone's face without their explicit, informed consent
- Impersonation, fraud, or romance / identity scams
- Defaming, harassing, intimidating, or deceiving any person
- Creating sexual or intimate content of real people without consent
- Bypassing identity, liveness, KYC, or biometric verification
Your Obligations MUST
- Get consent from everyone whose likeness you use, including source faces
- Disclose that an AI face-swap is in use during live calls and recordings
- Comply with local deepfake, impersonation, and biometric laws — they vary by region
- Honor the platform terms of any service you stream into
- Stop and delete material if a depicted person withdraws consent
License, Liability & Disclaimer
FACELESS is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). It is based on Deep-Live-Cam; see the repository LICENSE for full terms.
This software is provided for educational and research purposes as-is, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied. The authors and contributors are not liable for any use of this software and do not condone deceptive, harmful, or illegal use.
You bear full legal responsibility for what you do with FACELESS. Laws governing synthetic media, impersonation, publicity rights, and biometric data differ widely between jurisdictions and change quickly. If you are unsure whether your use is lawful where you are, do not proceed until you have confirmed it.
Build It From Source
FACELESS is open source. Clone the repo, install the dependencies, drop in the models, and launch the Electron app — which starts the Python backend for you.
inswapper_128_fp16.onnx (277MB) · GPEN-BFR-256.onnx (76MB, optional) — see the READMENVIDIA GPU with CUDA (RTX recommended) • Python 3.12+ • Node.js 20+ • 8GB+ RAM • OBS Studio optional (for the virtual-camera driver)