Image perturbation-based deep learning for face recognition utilizing discrete cosine transform

Abstract

Face recognition, including emotion classification and face attribute classification, has seen tremendous progress during the last decade owing to the use of deep learning. Large-scale data collected from numerous users have been the driving force in this growth. However, face images containing the identities of the owner can potentially cause severe privacy leakage if linked to other sensitive biometric information. The novel discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficient cutting method (DCC) proposed in this study combines DCT and pixelization to protect the privacy of the image. However, privacy is subjective, and it is not guaranteed that the transformed image will preserve privacy. To overcome this, a user study was conducted on whether DCC really preserves privacy. To this end, convolutional neural networks were trained for face recognition and face attribute classification tasks. Our survey and experiments demonstrate that a face recognition deep learning model can be trained with images that most people think preserve privacy at a manageable cost in classification accuracy.