Towards neural art-based face de-identification in video data

Abstract

We propose a computer vision-based pipeline that enables altering the appearance of faces in videos. Assuming a surveillance scenario, we combine GMM-based background subtraction with an improved version of the GrabCut algorithm to find and segment pedestrians. Independently, we detect faces using a standard face detector. We apply the neural art algorithm, utilizing the responses of a deep neural network to obfuscate the detected faces through style mixing with reference images. The altered faces are combined with the original frames using the extracted pedestrian silhouettes as a guideline. Experimental evaluation indicates that our method has potential in producing de-identified versions of the input frames while preserving the utility of the de-identified data.