A Consumer-Oriented Image Transformation Scheme With a Secret Key for Privacy Protection

Images in electronic devices may pose privacy threats since they can capture sensitive information about consumers. Meanwhile, face recognition (FR) systems are widely used, exacerbating these concerns. Some learning-based schemes have been proposed to protect the privacy of facial images. However, consumers might encounter challenges in implementing them due to specific requirements related to computing power and professional background. The non-learning semantic adversarial perturbation schemes address the aforementioned issues, but they are either irreversible or necessitate additional storage space. To this end, we propose a consumer-oriented image transformation scheme that can prevent the recognition of images by FR systems. It offers a consumer-friendly method compared to schemes that need high-performance equipment and specialized knowledge. The proposed scheme is implemented by reversible embedding the key to coefficients during the JPEG compression. The proposed scheme can be operated in general computing devices by ordinary consumers. The experiments demonstrated that facial images can be protected by the proposed scheme.