Puzzling face verification algorithms for privacy protection

This paper presents a new approach for de-identifying face images, i.e. for preventing automatic matching with public face collections. The overall motivation is to offer tools for privacy protection on social networks. We address this question by drawing a parallel between face de-identification and oracle attacks in digital watermarking. In our case, the identity of the face is seen as the watermark to be removed. Inspired by oracle attacks, we forge de-identified faces by superimposing a collection of carefully designed noise patterns onto the original face. The modification of the image is controlled to minimize the probability of good recognition while minimizing the distortion. In addition, these de-identified images are - by construction - made robust to counter attacks such as blurring. We present an experimental validation in which we de-identify LFW faces and show that resulting images are still recognized by human beings while deceiving a state-of-the-art face recognition algorithm.