Understanding Visual Privacy Protection: A Generalized Framework With an Instance on Facial Privacy

With the widespread application of computer vision, the scenarios in terms of visual privacy have become increasingly diverse and meanwhile numerous studies have been conducted to address privacy concerns in these scenarios. However, these studies are individually tailored for specific scenarios, making their layouts challenging to be drawn upon easily. When encountering a new scenario, it takes significant additional efforts to redesign a scheme due to the low referability of previous works. To tackle this issue, we explore commonalities among existing works and propose a generalized framework to meet the demand for visual privacy protection in various scenarios. Our framework is elaborately organized into several crucial steps, including privacy definition, scenario abstraction, algorithm design, and effect evaluation. It serves as a guide for researchers to efficiently design visual privacy protection schemes. In our framework, we establish a unified standard for quantifying privacy and introduce a novel constrained optimization theory to balance privacy and usability, which contributes to a broader understanding of visual privacy protection. Furthermore, we present an instance under the guidance of the framework that can support identity protection and attribute control scenarios through a diffusion-based model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.