A Privacy-Preserving Filter for Oblique Face Images Based on Adaptive Hopping Gaussian Mixtures

Photographs taken in 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 identity 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 the values of its parameters to counter attacks that attempt to estimate them. The filter exploits both global adaptiveness to reduce distortion and local parameter hopping to make their estimation difficult for an attacker. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach, we consider an important scenario of oblique face images: photographs taken with low altitude Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). 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 is also robust against attacks.