An Attack on Feature Level-based Facial Soft-biometric Privacy Enhancement
In the recent past, different researchers have proposed novel
privacy-enhancing face recognition systems designed to conceal soft-biometric
information at feature level. These works have reported impressive results, but
usually do not consider specific attacks in their analysis of privacy
protection. In most cases, the privacy protection capabilities of these schemes
are tested through simple machine learning-based classifiers and visualisations
of dimensionality reduction tools. In this work, we introduce an attack on
feature level-based facial soft-biometric privacy-enhancement techniques. The
attack is based on two observations: (1) to achieve high recognition accuracy,
certain similarities between facial representations have to be retained in
their privacy-enhanced versions; (2) highly similar facial representations
usually originate from face images with similar soft-biometric attributes.
Based on these observations, the proposed attack compares a privacy-enhanced
face representation against a set of privacy-enhanced face representations with
known soft-biometric attributes. Subsequently, the best obtained similarity
scores are analysed to infer the unknown soft-biometric attributes of the
attacked privacy-enhanced face representation. That is, the attack only
requires a relatively small database of arbitrary face images and the
privacy-enhancing face recognition algorithm as a black-box. In the
experiments, the attack is applied to two representative approaches which have
previously been reported to reliably conceal the gender in privacy-enhanced
face representations. It is shown that the presented attack is able to
circumvent the privacy enhancement to a considerable degree and is able to
correctly classify gender with an accuracy of up to approximately 90% for both
of the analysed privacy-enhancing face recognition systems.
Authors
Dailé Osorio-Roig, Christian Rathgeb, Pawel Drozdowski, Philipp Terhörst, Vitomir Štruc, Christoph Busch