The impact of abstract and object tags on image privacy classification

Object tags denote concrete entities and are central to many computer vision tasks, whereas abstract tags capture higher-level information, which is relevant for tasks that require a contextual, potentially subjective scene understanding. Object and abstract tags extracted from images also facilitate interpretability. In this paper, we explore which type of tags is more suitable for the context-dependent and inherently subjective task of image privacy. While object tags are generally used for privacy classification, we show that abstract tags are more effective when the tag budget is limited. Conversely, when a larger number of tags per image is available, object-related information is as useful. We believe that these findings will guide future research in developing more accurate image privacy classifiers, informed by the role of tag types and quantity.

Human-interpretable and deep features for image privacy classification

Privacy is a complex, subjective and contextual concept that is difficult to define. Therefore, the annotation of images to train privacy classifiers is a challenging task. In this paper, we analyse privacy classification datasets and the properties of controversial images that are annotated with contrasting privacy labels by different assessors. We discuss suitable features for image privacy classification and propose eight privacy-specific and human-interpretable features. These features increase the performance of deep learning models and, on their own, improve the image representation for privacy classification compared with much higher dimensional deep features.