IdentityDP: Differential private identification protection for face images

Abstract

Because of the explosive growth of face photos as well as their widespread dissemination and easy accessibility in social media, the security and privacy of personal identity information become an unprecedented challenge. Meanwhile, the convenience brought by advanced identity-agnostic computer vision technologies is attractive. Therefore, it is important to use face images while taking careful consideration in protecting people’s identities. Given a face image, face de-identification, also known as face anonymization, refers to generating another image with similar appearance and the same background, while the real identity is hidden. Although extensive efforts have been made, existing face de-identification techniques are either insufficient in photo-reality or incapable of well-balancing privacy and utility. In this paper, we focus on tackling these challenges to improve face de-identification. We propose IdentityDP, a face anonymization framework that combines a data-driven deep neural network with a differential privacy (DP) mechanism. This framework encompasses three stages: facial representations disentanglement, ∊-IdentityDP perturbation and image reconstruction. Our model can effectively obfuscate the identity-related information of faces, preserve significant visual similarity, and generate high-quality images that can be used for identity-agnostic computer vision tasks, such as detection, tracking, etc. Different from the previous methods, we can adjust the balance of privacy and utility through the privacy budget according to practical demands and provide a diversity of results without pre-annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our proposed anonymization framework.