CLIP2Protect: Protecting Facial Privacy using Text-Guided Makeup via Adversarial Latent Search

The success of deep learning based face recognition systems has given rise to serious privacy concerns due to their ability to enable unauthorized tracking of users in the digital world. Existing methods for enhancing privacy fail to generate naturalistic images that can protect facial privacy without compromising user experience. We propose a novel two-step approach for facial privacy protection that relies on finding adversarial latent codes in the low-dimensional manifold of a pretrained generative model. The first step inverts the given face image into the latent space and finetunes the generative model to achieve an accurate reconstruction of the given image from its latent code. This step produces a good initialization, aiding the generation of high-quality faces that resemble the given identity. Subsequently, user-defined makeup text prompts and identity-preserving regularization are used to guide the search for adversarial codes in the latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that faces generated by our approach have stronger black-box transferability with an absolute gain of 12.06% over the state-of-the-art facial privacy protection approach under the face verification task. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for commercial face recognition systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/fahadshamshad/Clip2Protect.Comment: Accepted in CVPR 2023. Project page: https://fahadshamshad.github.io/Clip2Protect

Cross-resolution Face Recognition via Identity-Preserving Network and Knowledge Distillation

Cross-resolution face recognition has become a challenging problem for modern deep face recognition systems. It aims at matching a low-resolution probe image with high-resolution gallery images registered in a database. Existing methods mainly leverage prior information from high-resolution images by either reconstructing facial details with super-resolution techniques or learning a unified feature space. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a new approach that enforces the network to focus on the discriminative information stored in the low-frequency components of a low-resolution image. A cross-resolution knowledge distillation paradigm is first employed as the learning framework. Then, an identity-preserving network, WaveResNet, and a wavelet similarity loss are designed to capture low-frequency details and boost performance. Finally, an image degradation model is conceived to simulate more realistic low-resolution training data. Consequently, extensive experimental results show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the baseline model and other state-of-the-art methods across a variety of image resolutions

VGAN-Based Image Representation Learning for Privacy-Preserving Facial Expression Recognition

Reliable facial expression recognition plays a critical role in human-machine interactions. However, most of the facial expression analysis methodologies proposed to date pay little or no attention to the protection of a user's privacy. In this paper, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Representation-Learning Variational Generative Adversarial Network (PPRL-VGAN) to learn an image representation that is explicitly disentangled from the identity information. At the same time, this representation is discriminative from the standpoint of facial expression recognition and generative as it allows expression-equivalent face image synthesis. We evaluate the proposed model on two public datasets under various threat scenarios. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our approach strikes a balance between the preservation of privacy and data utility. We further demonstrate that our model can be effectively applied to other tasks such as expression morphing and image completion