Fairness and privacy preservation for facial images: GAN-based methods

Facial images are widely adopted for computer vision tasks such as face recognition or attribute classi-fications. Consequently, the adoption of mass real facial images leads to significant identification privacy leakage concerns. Meanwhile, the model classification results suffer unfair predictions towards features such as genders due to biased training data distributions. Although methods have been proposed to re-solve the privacy and fairness issues separately, simultaneous protection methods are merely studied. In this study, for facial attributes classifications, we propose one unified framework with GAN models to generate synthetic images for privacy protections and contrastive learning based loss designs to enforce fairness protections simultaneously. Meanwhile, unlike other privacy or fairness protection methods, the proposed methods can maintain high data and model utilities. We evaluate our approaches with the high image resolution dataset CelebA-HD, and the results show our methods meet both privacy and fairness requirements.(c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.