Concealing the identity of faces in oblique images with adaptive hopping Gaussian mixtures
This addresses privacy concerns for bystanders in public places captured by drone cameras, but it is incremental as it builds on existing privacy filtering techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of privacy violation in aerial photographs by proposing a filter that pseudo-randomly modifies face regions to prevent identity inference, showing it protects privacy while reducing distortion and resisting attacks.
Cameras mounted on Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are increasingly used for recreational photography. However, aerial photographs of public places often contain faces of bystanders thus leading to a perceived or actual violation of privacy. To address this issue, we propose to pseudo-randomly modify the appearance of face regions in the images using a privacy filter that prevents a human or a face recogniser from inferring the identities of people. The filter, which is applied only when the resolution is high enough for a face to be recognisable, adaptively distorts the face appearance as a function of its resolution. Moreover, the proposed filter locally changes its parameters to discourage attacks that use parameter estimation. The filter exploits both global adaptiveness to reduce distortion and local hopping of the parameters to make their estimation difficult for an attacker. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach, we use a state-of-the-art face recognition algorithm and synthetically generated face data with 3D geometric image transformations that mimic faces captured from an MAV at different heights and pitch angles. Experimental results show that the proposed filter protects privacy while reducing distortion and exhibits resilience against attacks.