Reversible anonymization for privacy of facial biometrics via cyclic learning

Abstract Facial recognition systems have emerged as indispensable components in identity verification. These systems heavily rely on facial data, which is stored in a biometric database. However, storing such data in a database raises concerns about privacy breaches. To address this issue, several technologies have been proposed for protecting facial biometrics. Unfortunately, many of these methods can cause irreversible damage to the data, rendering it unusable for other purposes. In this paper, we propose a novel reversible anonymization scheme for face images via cyclic learning. In our scheme, face images can be de-identified for privacy protection and reidentified when necessary. To achieve this, we employ generative adversarial networks with a cycle consistency loss function to learn the bidirectional transformation between the de-identified and re-identified domains. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme performs well in terms of both de-identification and reidentification. Furthermore, a security analysis validates the effectiveness of our system in mitigating potential attacks.