Identifiable Face Privacy Protection via Virtual Identity Transformation

Massive face images collected in smart surveillance and social networks are vulnerable to malicious access, thus compromising individual privacy. Existing schemes have been able to protect face privacy while preserving a certain level of identifiability, but have different limitations, e.g., the lack of strong transferability or the inability to retain irrelevant attributes. This letter proposes a novel face privacy protection scheme via virtual identity transformation, which guarantees strong privacy protection and high identifiability. We first solve a specific identity mask for the user, which ensures that the identity features extracted only from the user's faces can be approximated to the given virtual identity. Based on it, the identity transformation networks transform the original face into the protected form, which belongs to the virtual identity while retaining irrelevant attributes. Lastly, the virtual identity of the protected face is extracted for face recognition. Adequate experiments show that our scheme has satisfactory privacy protection, high identifiability, and strong transferability.