GMFIM: A generative mask-guided facial image manipulation model for privacy preservation

Abstract

The use of social media has become so popular that people share photos every day on them. Automatic face recognition and tagging of people’s photos have caused privacy preservation issues and some methods have been proposed for hiding the identity of presented people in these images. Blurring and blacking the face area, adding physical adversarial patches to the face, and adding adversarial masks are some proposed methods for this purpose. However, these methods particularly suffer from dissimilarity of the input and output images and inadequate performance in identity concealment from automatic face recognition (AFR) systems. In this paper, we propose the Generative Mask-guided Face Image Manipulation (GMFIM) model based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to apply imperceptible edits to the input face image to preserve the identity of the person in the image. Our model consists of a face mask module, a GAN-based optimization module, and a merge module. Different criteria are considered in the objective function of the optimization step to produce high-quality images that are as similar as possible to the input image while they cannot be recognized by AFR systems. The results of the experiments on different datasets show that our model provides promising results in terms of the quality of the generated images and the identity concealment performance.