Diffusion-based Identity-Preserving Facial Privacy Protection

The efficacy of facial recognition systems that utilize deep learning techniques has led to significant concerns over privacy, since they possess the capability to facilitate unauthorized monitoring of individuals in the digital realm. Current techniques for improving privacy are ineffective in producing "naturalistic" photographs that can safeguard facial features and fail to ensure privacy while maintaining an optimal user experience. We present an innovative text-agnostic method for protecting facial privacy. Our method depends on manipulating the sampling process of a pretrained diffusion model utilizing the guidance from a target image face together with the original image and face guidance in an adversarial manner to produce a protected face image. We preserve the original visual information from the input face image for identity preservation while extracting general embedding information from the target face image for soft facial attribute transfer. The output protected face image from our method has imperceptible facial changes with enhanced privacy protection against state-of-the-art (SOTA) face recognition (FR) systems. Our extensive studies have shown that the faces generated using our method have a higher level of black-box adaptability, resulting in an absolute improvement of 6.4% on CelebA-HQ compared to the current most effective SOTA facial privacy protection technique in the face verification task while maintaining high image fidelity.