Latent Representation Reorganization for Face Privacy Protection

The issue of face privacy protection has aroused wide social concern along with the increasing applications of face images. The latest methods focus on achieving a good privacy-utility tradeoff so that the protected results can still be used to support the downstream computer vision tasks. However, they may suffer from limited flexibility in manipulating this tradeoff because the practical requirements may vary under different scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel recurrent latent representation reorganization (LReOrg) framework to deal with the problem. LReOrg relies on two key modules to deal with the privacy-utility tradeoff, where the first one is responsible for anonymizing the privacy sensitive information and the other is responsible for recovering the destroyed useful insensitive information according to user requirements. LReOrg is advantageous in: (a) enabling users to recurrently process fine-grained attributes; (b) providing flexible control over privacy-utility tradeoff by manipulating which attributes to anonymize or preserve using cross-modal keywords; and (c) eliminating the need of data annotations for network training. The experimental results on benchmark datasets have reported the superior ability of our approach for providing flexible protection on facial information.