
DeepPrivacy: A Generative Adversarial Network for Face Anonymization - baylearn
https://github.com/hukkelas/DeepPrivacy/blob/master/README.md
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jsilence
Wow, that is really close to the animation of the anonymizer hood in 'a
scanner darkly'
([https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/)).

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tyingq
Here's the clip I think you wanted..."the scramble suit":
[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrvzb](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrvzb)

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coolspot
Would be useful for amateur adult video sharing. Where face privacy is
important, but blur kills the joy.

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lucb1e
Or any other place where privacy is important and you want to share a crowd
shot or want to take a shot where there are unfortunately people in the
background. Which is pretty much the default for me in public settings / where
I don't know every person in the picture personally, but in particular, hacker
conferences are the kind of place that comes to mind.

I guess the photographer should (for the foreseeable future) always double
check that it got each of them (perhaps by having the algorithm produce a
second picture with green squares around detected faces), but that's peanuts
compared to having to open up an editing program and blurring the region or
even each face individually (try doing that on mobile), and blurring looks
much worse.

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pndy
That example gif at the top - the way faces blend between reminds me of
camouflage effect from "A Scanner Darkly" film

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tyingq
Here's the clip:
[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrvzb](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrvzb)

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false-mirror
Really cool project! I wonder how long until this sort of software is used in
place of blurred-faces.

It would be really nice to shoot a public space and instead of worrying about
release forms, just anonymize the footage.

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kzrdude
I didn't know what GANs were or how they worked, but this video from yesterday
explained it really well. So I'll recommend it for anyone else curious!

The clear explanation of what a GAN is from the first 8-10 minutes of the
video. And there are quite a few interesting examples in there as well.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCKbRCUyop8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCKbRCUyop8)

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thomas_bai
Great to see more research being done on the topic! :) At Brighter AI, we work
on this technology since almost 2 years, offering a natural anonymization
solution for faces as well as license plates
([https://brighter.ai/video](https://brighter.ai/video)). Preventing facial
recognition when collecting data in public is very important and to be fair,
also other companies pursue this now.

Best regards from Berlin, Thomas (thomas@brighter.ai)

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a785236
I wish the authors wouldn't oversell the privacy claim:

> Github: "The DeepPrivacy GAN never sees any privacy sensitive information,
> ensuring a fully anonymized image."

> Abstract: "We ensure total anonymization of all faces in an image by
> generating images exclusively on privacy-safe information."

> Paper: "We propose a novel generator architecture to anonymize faces, which
> ensures 100% removal of privacy-sensitive information in the original face."

Changing a face anonymizes an image the same way that removing a name
anonymizes a dataset -- poorly. This is cool, but it's not anonymization.

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lucb1e
"This is cool, but it's not anonymization." Isn't it?

For clarity it might be good to establish what I mean when I talk about three
terms: "identifiable" is either the original, encrypted with the key
available, or a hashed version or bloom filter (or so) of low-entropy data
such as email addresses or phone numbers; "pseudonymous" is replacing the data
with a unique but disconnected value (e.g. a UUID, or encrypted with a random
key and key destroyed); and "anonymous" is either no data, or data that has no
relation to the original.

As far as I can tell, this algorithm replaces the data with a random value
that has no relation to the original. I understand that if we have a list of
HN comment metadata and you remove the usernames ("anonymize"), you can still
find me by the time of posting correlated to DNS request logs at the ISP. In
the case of pictures, I guess the place is usually identifiable + the time is
known, thus you can potentially piece together who was there at that time,
corroborated by the presence of a certain backpack or shirt.

Is that what you mean, or is there something else that makes you say it is
either still identifiable or pseudonymized rather than anonymized?

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a785236
No, it isn't.

> ... this algorithm replaces the data with a random value that has no
> relation to the original.

Based on that sentence, I assume that when you write "the data" you mean "the
part of a picture corresponding to a person's face." But removing the face
from a picture doesn't necessarily make it particularly difficult to identify
the subject if the subject is very familiar to you. It doesn't matter if
you've never seen that specific picture, or if you have no additional context
like place and time.

Just look at the examples on the GitHub page for proof! The picture of Obama
and Trump is clearly recognizable, and at least one of the other Obama photos
is easy to recognize. The soccer players are identifiable from their jersies
(Messi is #10 on Barcelona). Jennifer Lawrence was also easy for me to spot.

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lucb1e
> if the subject is very familiar to you.

Fair enough, if you know what someone wears, their exact skin color, build,
and perhaps even the place they are in, then sure, blacking out the face (or
changing it for that matter) won't help. I guess I agree that this is more
common than the authors make it sound (it's indeed not 100% guaranteed
absolutely anonymous always ever, as they put it). But I do have to say, this
is about as good as blacking out the face completely and a lot less obnoxious.

> The picture of Obama and Trump is clearly recognizable

You sure? If I show this picture in isolation to someone
[https://snipboard.io/VjwEc1.jpg](https://snipboard.io/VjwEc1.jpg) I'm not
sure that they will say it's Obama. Not sure there is a politically correct
way of saying this, but there aren't that many people that are well-known by
billions with that skin tone and in a suit, so of course if you ask them "the
face was changed, who is this?" they can do a lucky guess for Obama because
that's the only guessable possibility.

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baylearn
link to the arxiv paper:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04538](https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04538)

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optician_owl
Looks like ears are unchanged but it's a strong identifier.

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dvh
DeepGoldstein

