Adversarial Face Database against Deep Learning-Enabled Reconstruction Attacks

Face recognition systems offer a range of applications that enhance security, efficiency, and personalization, e.g., access control, identity verification, and personalized services. Mainstream facial recognition systems employ the Edge-Cloud architecture to protect user privacy by storing facial feature data instead of original facial images. However, recently emerging reconstruction attacks based on deep learning can recover the visual information of original facial images from facial features, resulting in face privacy disclosure. Existing anti-reconstruction approaches either compromise facial recognition accuracy or fail to meet real-time requirements. In this article, we propose a practical privacy-preserving approach based on adversarial perturbations against reconstruction attacks. By incorporating subtle adversarial interference into facial features, the mapping relationship from facial features to original facial images is disrupted, and the baseline reconstruction networks cannot recover the original face image. We conducted experiments on two facial recognition models, FaceNet and ArcFace, both widely deployed in practical scenarios. The results show that the face recognition accuracy sacrifice of less than 1% can significantly reduce the quality of the reconstructed image. In terms of efficiency, the average time to generate an adversarial facial feature is less than 10 ms, meeting the real-time requirements of facial recognition.