Realistic Face Reconstruction from Facial Embeddings via Diffusion Models
This work addresses privacy leakage concerns for users of face recognition and privacy-preserving face recognition systems, presenting an incremental method for evaluating safety.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying privacy risks in face recognition systems by reconstructing realistic high-resolution face images from facial embeddings, showing that reconstructed faces can access other real-world FR systems with robustness against partial and protected embeddings.
With the advancement of face recognition (FR) systems, privacy-preserving face recognition (PPFR) systems have gained popularity for their accurate recognition, enhanced facial privacy protection, and robustness to various attacks. However, there are limited studies to further verify privacy risks by reconstructing realistic high-resolution face images from embeddings of these systems, especially for PPFR. In this work, we propose the face embedding mapping (FEM), a general framework that explores Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) for conducting the embedding-to-face attack by leveraging pre-trained Identity-Preserving diffusion model against state-of-the-art (SOTA) FR and PPFR systems. Based on extensive experiments, we verify that reconstructed faces can be used for accessing other real-word FR systems. Besides, the proposed method shows the robustness in reconstructing faces from the partial and protected face embeddings. Moreover, FEM can be utilized as a tool for evaluating safety of FR and PPFR systems in terms of privacy leakage. All images used in this work are from public datasets.