Face deidentification is an active topic amongst privacy and security researchers. Early deidentification methods relying on image blurring or pixelisation have been replaced in recent years with techniques based on formal anonymity models that provide privacy guaranties and retain certain characteristics of the data even after deidentification. The latter aspect is important, as it allows the deidentified data to be used in applications for which identity information is irrelevant. In this work, the authors present a novel face deidentification pipeline, which ensures anonymity by synthesising artificial surrogate faces using generative neural networks (GNNs). The generated faces are used to deidentify subjects in images or videos, while preserving non-identity-related aspects of the data and consequently enabling data utilisation. Since generative networks are highly adaptive and can utilise diverse parameters (pertaining to the appearance of the generated output in terms of facial expressions, gender, race etc.), they represent a natural choice for the problem of face deidentification. To demonstrate the feasibility of the authors’ approach, they perform experiments using automated recognition tools and human annotators. Their results show that the recognition performance on deidentified images is close to chance, suggesting that the deidentification process based on GNNs is effective.
A major issue that arises from mass visual media distribution in modern video sharing, social media and cloud services, is the issue of privacy. Malicious users can use these services to track the actions of certain individuals and or groups thus violating their privacy. As a result the need to hinder automatic facial image identification in images and videos arises. In this paper we propose a method for de-identifying facial images. Contrary to most de-identification methods, this method manipulates facial images so that humans can still recognize the individual or individuals in an image or video frame, but at the same time common automatic identification algorithms fail to do so. This is achieved by projecting the facial images on a hypersphere. From the conducted experiments it can be verified that this method is effective in reducing the classification accuracy under 10 . Furthermore, in the resulting images the subject can be identified by human viewers. We propose a computer vision-based pipeline that enables altering the appearance of faces in videos. Assuming a surveillance scenario, we combine GMM-based background subtraction with an improved version of the GrabCut algorithm to find and segment pedestrians. Independently, we detect faces using a standard face detector. We apply the neural art algorithm, utilizing the responses of a deep neural network to obfuscate the detected faces through style mixing with reference images. The altered faces are combined with the original frames using the extracted pedestrian silhouettes as a guideline. Experimental evaluation indicates that our method has potential in producing de-identified versions of the input frames while preserving the utility of the de-identified data.