Toward Privacy and Utility Preserving Image Representation

Face images are rich data items that are useful and can easily be collected in many applications, such as in 1-to-1 face verification tasks in the domain of security and surveillance systems. Multiple methods have been proposed to protect an individual's privacy by perturbing the images to remove traces of identifiable information, such as gender or race. However, significantly less attention has been given to the problem of protecting images while maintaining optimal task utility. In this paper, we study the novel problem of creating privacy-preserving image representations with respect to a given utility task by proposing a principled framework called the Adversarial Image Anonymizer (AIA). AIA first creates an image representation using a generative model, then enhances the learned image representations using adversarial learning to preserve privacy and utility for a given task. Experiments were conducted on a publicly available data set to demonstrate the effectiveness of AIA as a privacy-preserving mechanism for face images.