Face image de-identification based on feature embedding

A large number of images are available on the Internet with the growth of social networking services, and many of them are face photos or contain faces. It is necessary to protect the privacy of face images to prevent their malicious use by face image de-identification techniques that make face recognition difficult, which prevent the collection of specific face images using face recognition. In this paper, we propose a face image de-identification method that generates a de-identified image from an input face image by embedding facial features extracted from that of another person into the input face image. We develop the novel framework for embedding facial features into a face image and loss functions based on images and features to de-identify a face image preserving its appearance. Through a set of experiments using public face image datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits higher de-identification performance against unknown face recognition models than conventional methods while preserving the appearance of the input face images.