Local Features Meet Stochastic Anonymization: Revolutionizing Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition for Black-Box Models

Understand

The task of privacy-preserving face recognition (PPFR) currently faces two major unsolved challenges: (1) existing methods are typically effective only on specific face recognition models and struggle to generalize to black-box face recognition models; (2) current methods employ data-driven reversible representation encoding for privacy protection, making them susceptible to adversarial learning and reconstruction of the original image.

• We observe that face recognition models primarily rely on local features ({e.g., face contour, skin texture, and so on) for identification.
• Thus, by disrupting global features while enhancing local features, we achieve effective recognition even in black-box environments.
• Additionally, to prevent adversarial models from learning and reversing the anonymization process, we adopt an adversarial learning-based approach with irreversible stochastic injection to ensure the stochastic nature of the anonymization.