Training DNN Model with Secret Key for Model Protection

In this paper, we propose a model protection method by using block-wise pixel shuffling with a secret key as a preprocessing technique to input images for the first time. The protected model is built by training with such preprocessed images. Experiment results show that the performance of the protected model is close to that of non-protected models when the key is correct, while the accuracy is severely dropped when an incorrect key is given, and the proposed model protection has enough robustness against fine-tuning attacks, while maintaining almost the same performance accuracy as that of using a nonprotected model.