L. Andrea Dunbar

Yamin Sepehri, Pedram Pad, Pascal Frossard et al.

The training phase of deep neural networks requires substantial resources and as such is often performed on cloud servers. However, this raises privacy concerns when the training dataset contains sensitive content, e.g., facial or medical images. In this work, we propose a method to perform the training phase of a deep learning model on both an edge device and a cloud server that prevents sensitive content being transmitted to the cloud while retaining the desired information. The proposed privacy-preserving method uses adversarial early exits to suppress the sensitive content at the edge and transmits the task-relevant information to the cloud. This approach incorporates noise addition during the training phase to provide a differential privacy guarantee. We extensively test our method on different facial and medical datasets with diverse attributes using various deep learning architectures, showcasing its outstanding performance. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of privacy preservation through successful defenses against different white-box, deep and GAN-based reconstruction attacks. This approach is designed for resource-constrained edge devices, ensuring minimal memory usage and computational overhead.

Yamin Sepehri, Pedram Pad, Pascal Frossard et al.

Preserving privacy is a growing concern in our society where sensors and cameras are ubiquitous. In this work, for the first time, we propose a trainable image acquisition method that removes the sensitive identity revealing information in the optical domain before it reaches the image sensor. The method benefits from a trainable optical convolution kernel which transmits the desired information while filters out the sensitive content. As the sensitive content is suppressed before it reaches the image sensor, it does not enter the digital domain therefore is unretrievable by any sort of privacy attack. This is in contrast with the current digital privacy-preserving methods that are all vulnerable to direct access attack. Also, in contrast with the previous optical privacy-preserving methods that cannot be trained, our method is data-driven and optimized for the specific application at hand. Moreover, there is no additional computation, memory, or power burden on the acquisition system since this processing happens passively in the optical domain and can even be used together and on top of the fully digital privacy-preserving systems. The proposed approach is adaptable to different digital neural networks and content. We demonstrate it for several scenarios such as smile detection as the desired attribute while the gender is filtered out as the sensitive content. We trained the optical kernel in conjunction with two adversarial neural networks where the analysis network tries to detect the desired attribute and the adversarial network tries to detect the sensitive content. We show that this method can reduce 65.1% of sensitive content when it is selected to be the gender and it only loses 7.3% of the desired content. Moreover, we reconstruct the original faces using the deep reconstruction method that confirms the ineffectiveness of reconstruction attacks to obtain the sensitive content.