CLEANIR: Controllable attribute-preserving natural identity remover

Abstract

We live in an era of privacy concerns. As smart devices such as smartphones, service robots and surveillance cameras spread, preservation of our privacy becomes one of the major concerns in our daily life. Traditionally, the problem was resolved by simple approaches such as image masking or blurring. While these provide effective ways to remove identities from images, there are certain limitations when it comes to a matter of recognition from the processed images. For example, one may want to get ambient information from scenes even when privacy-related information such as facial appearance is removed or changed. To address the issue, our goal in this paper is not only to modify identity from faces but also keeps facial attributes such as color, pose and facial expression for further applications. We propose a novel face de-identification method based on a deep generative model in which we design the output vector from an encoder to be disentangled into two parts: identity-related part and the rest representing facial attributes. We show that by solely modifying the identity-related part from the latent vector, our method effectively modifies the facial identity to a completely new one while the other attributes that are loosely related to personal identity are preserved. To validate the proposed method, we provide results from experiments that measure two different aspects: effectiveness of personal identity modification and facial attribute preservation.