Securing synthetic faces: A GAN-blockchain approach to privacy-enhanced facial recognition

Abstract

In recent years, facial recognition technology has become increasingly integrated into society, making privacy protection crucial. Previous techniques offered minimal secrecy safeguards through simple obscuration methods. This paper addresses the strict privacy requirements of face image data by developing a novel framework that synergistically integrates Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), clustering algorithms, and Blockchain technology. The methodology proposes a cutting-edge Privacy-Preserving Self-Attention GAN (PPSA-GAN) to generate realistic synthetic facial imagery. An integrated mini-batch K-means clustering algorithm anonymizes these images into distinct groupings, maximizing privacy preservation. Blockchain integration complements the system by fortifying trust through decentralized ledgers for transparent yet secure data storage and auditing. Rigorous benchmarking on the CelebA dataset confirms the PPSA-GAN architecture’s state-of-the-art performance, attaining an impressive Inception Score of 13.99 and a Fréchet Inception Distance of 35.50. The mini-batch clustering forms 125 distinct clusters, effectively anonymizing facial attributes within the synthetic images. Blockchain integration further bolsters privacy assurances via tamper-proof historical records, showcasing precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy values of 0.948, 0.938, 0.943, and 0.947, respectively. This multifunctional framework represents a novel contribution, fostering an ethical technological ecosystem that balances progress and privacy. Prospective deployment horizons encompass identity verification, surveillance infrastructure, and augmentation of medical image repositories, seeding an enlightening future for facial recognition domains.