This AI Gives Users ‘Digital Mask’ to Protect Photos From Facial Recognition

Researchers have developed an AI model that gives users a “digital mask” to protect them from facial recognition technology.

In a study published in the arXiv database, a team of researchers from Georgia Tech University detailed how they created the AI model dubbed “Chameleon.”

Chameleon uses a special masking technology to generate a mask that hides faces in photos without impacting the visual quality of the protected images.

Chameleon uses a special masking technique that gives users a digital “single, personalized privacy protection (P-3) mask.” Once the mask has been applied to a person in a photograph, the images cannot be detected by facial recognition tools as the scans will show them “as being someone else.”

According to a report by Gadgets360, while face masking tools already exist, the Chameleon AI model innovates on both resource optimization and image quality perseverance.

To accomplish this, the researchers emphasized that the tool creates a single mask per user based on a small set of user-submitted facial photos, rather than generating separate masks for each image. This approach significantly reduces the processing power needed to produce the invisible mask.

Protecting Photos From Facial Recognition Tech and AI

The researchers say that preserving the image quality of a protected photo was a far more challenging process. The researchers used a perceptibility optimization technique in Chameleon to protect the images.

This technique automatically renders the mask without any manual intervention or parameter setting, thus allowing the AI to not obfuscate the overall photo quality.

Describing the AI model as a significant advancement in privacy protection, the researchers announced plans to release Chameleon’s code publicly on GitHub soon. Once open-sourced, developers can integrate the model into various applications.

“Privacy-preserving data sharing and analytics like Chameleon will help to advance governance and responsible adoption of AI technology and stimulate responsible science and innovation,” Ling Liu, professor of data and intelligence-powered computing at Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science, and the lead author of the research paper, says in a statement.

The researchers also hope Chameleon’s technology could be applied to protect photos from generative AI.

“We would like to use these techniques to protect images from being used to train artificial intelligence generative models. We could protect the image information from being used without consent,” PhD student Tiansheng Huang adds.

Last month, a group of researchers created an AI system called “Face Anonymization Made Simple” which masks a person’s identity without substantially changing the basic image.

 
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.