GMFIM: A Generative Mask-guided Facial Image Manipulation Model for Privacy Preservation

The use of social media websites and applications has become very popular and people share their photos on these networks. Automatic recognition and tagging of people's photos on these networks has raised privacy preservation issues and users seek methods for hiding their identities from these algorithms. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are shown to be very powerful in generating face images in high diversity and also in editing face images. In this paper, we propose a Generative Mask-guided Face Image Manipulation (GMFIM) model based on GANs to apply imperceptible editing to the input face image to preserve the privacy of the person in the image. Our model consists of three main components: a) the face mask module to cut the face area out of the input image and omit the background, b) the GAN-based optimization module for manipulating the face image and hiding the identity and, c) the merge module for combining the background of the input image and the manipulated de-identified face image. Different criteria are considered in the loss function of the optimization step to produce high-quality images that are as similar as possible to the input image while they cannot be recognized by AFR systems. The results of the experiments on different datasets show that our model can achieve better performance against automated face recognition systems in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods and it catches a higher attack success rate in most experiments from a total of 18. Moreover, the generated images of our proposed model have the highest quality and are more pleasing to human eyes.