Non-Global Privacy Protection Facing Sensitive Areas in Face Images

Abstract

Face images, as an information carrier, are naturally weak in privacy. If they are collected and analyzed by malicious third parties, personal privacy will leak, and many other unmeasurable losses will occur. Differential privacy protection of face images is mainly being studied under non-interactive frameworks. However, the ε-effect impacts the entire image under these frameworks. Besides, the noise influence is uniform across the protected image, during the realization of the Laplace mechanism. The differential privacy of face images under interactive mechanisms can protect the privacy of different areas to different degrees, but the total error is still constrained by the image size. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a non-global privacy protection method for sensitive areas in face images, known as differential privacy of landmark positioning (DPLP). The proposed algorithm is realized as follows: Firstly, the active shape model (ASM) algorithm was adopted to position the area of each face landmark. If the landmark overlaps a subgraph of the original image, then the subgraph would be taken as a sensitive area. Then, the sensitive area was treated as the seed for regional growth, following the fusion similarity measurement mechanism (FSMM). In our method, the privacy budget is only allocated to the seed; whether any other insensitive area would be protected depends on whether the area exists in a growing region. In addition, when a subgraph meets the criterion for merging with multiple seeds, the most reasonable seed to be merged would be selected by the exponential mechanism. Experimental results show that the DPLP algorithm satisfies ε-differential privacy, its total error does not change with image size, and the noisy image remains highly available.