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Personalized Face Privacy Protection From a Single Image

Summary

A new system called FaceCloak generates personalized face privacy masks from a single image, making facial recognition fail. It uses a three-stage methodology involving synthetic image generation, iterative perturbation, and pixel-wise masking. Experiments on ten recognition models show it outperforms 29 existing methods.

SourcearXiv Computer VisionAuthor: Zachary Yahn, Fatih Ilhan, Tiansheng Huang, Selim Tekin, Sihao Hu, Yichang Xu, Margaret Loper, Ling Liu
Personalized Face Privacy Protection From a Single Image
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[2605.19032] Personalized Face Privacy Protection From a Single Image

[Submitted on 18 May 2026]

Title:Personalized Face Privacy Protection From a Single Image

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Abstract:Photos of faces uploaded online are vulnerable to malicious actors who can scrape facial images from online sources and intrude on personal privacy via unauthorized use of facial recognition models. This paper presents FaceCloak, a novel personalized face privacy protection system, which can generate defensive identity-specific universal face privacy masks from a single image of a user, causing facial recognition to fail. FaceCloak introduces a three-stage personalized face perturbation learning methodology: (1) It generates a small set of high-variety synthetic face images of a person based on a single image of the person. (2) It learns face cloaking by adding more protection to key facial-identity leakage regions through iterative perturbation generation over the small set of synthetic images, effectively shifting a user's identity embedding towards a distant anchor identity and away from a similar one. (3) It generates a personalized identity-protective mask in the form of pixel-wise cloaking, which is light-weight and can be efficiently applied to any facial image of a user while maintaining good perceptual quality. Extensive experiments on three popular face datasets across ten recognition models show the effectiveness of FaceCloak compared to 29 other existing representative methods. Code is available at this https URL

Subjects:

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

Cite as: arXiv:2605.19032 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2605.19032v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19032

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Zachary Yahn [view email] [v1] Mon, 18 May 2026 18:56:56 UTC (4,858 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • FaceCloak generates identity-specific universal face privacy masks from a single image.
  • It uses a three-stage methodology: synthetic image generation, iterative perturbation learning, and pixel-wise masking.
  • Experiments on ten recognition models show it outperforms 29 existing methods.
  • Code is available on GitHub.

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