15 Computer Vision News Computer Vision News Privacy-preserving face analytics … of soft biometrics – attributes such as age, gender, ethnicity, and healthrelated cues that can be inferred from an image of a face. “Privacy in the context of face analytics can be approached from two high-level angles,” Peter tells us. “One is de-identification. Let’s say you have an image of a face and want to remove identity-related cues from it. You can just put a black box over it, but that’s probably not the best way, or you can try to do something more photorealistic. You can remove identity-related cues but preserve soft biometrics. The other angle is to preserve identity but try to remove soft-biometric attributes, so it’s like the inverse of such deidentification.” This work is particularly important when biometric templates are stored in cloud-based systems to protect them from misuse by authorized persons for profit or discriminatory practices. In this regard, it fits well with the European Union’s more cautious approach to artificial intelligence and focus on privacy regulation. Peter suspects this alignment caught the attention of the award judges at the European Association for Biometrics (EAB). “If you put a constraint on a problem, you also have innovation in that respect,” he points out. “It’s kind of suppressing creativity and innovation in one sense, but from another perspective, when you have additional constraints, it forces you to think in directions that others don’t care about!” Soft biometrics can be divided into two broad categories: local and global. Local soft-biometrics, such as hair length or lipstick or the presence of a beard, are defined by pixels that are close together. Global The goal of soft-biometric privacy-enhancing techniques (SB-PETs) is to establish a control mechanism over information (illustrated by locking system) to disable the extraction of specific soft-biometric attribute (locked/unlocked) while still preserving identity information (always unlocked), for example for face verification purposes.
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