3PFS: protecting pedestrian privacy through face swapping

Abstract

In the era of artificial intelligence, privacy has become a paramount concern, especially within intelligent transportation systems (ITS) where pedestrians are frequently captured by vehicle-mounted cameras for deep learning model training. To address this, we introduce 3PFS, a novel method designed to protect pedestrian privacy via face swapping while preserving the utility of processed images. Our method consists of a pedestrian detector, a face detector, a pre-processing module, a source face selection algorithm, and a face swapping algorithm. After detecting pedestrians and their corresponding faces, the pre-processing module enhances image quality. Our unique source face selection algorithm then chooses an appropriate face from our source face library, which is subsequently swapped with the target face using a face swapping algorithm. Notably, with the combination of a pedestrian tracking algorithm, our 3PFS is well-suited for video anonymization. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive evaluation strategy to evaluate the performance of pedestrian anonymization methods. We validate the effectiveness of 3PFS through extensive experiments on a dataset we created based on the publicly available JAAD dataset and on videos captured using our robotic wheelchair.