Seam Carving for Image Classification Privacy

James Pope, Mark Terwilliger

2021

Abstract

The advent of storing images on cloud platforms has introduced serious privacy concerns. The images are routinely scanned by machine learning algorithms to determine the contents. Usually the scanning is for marketing purposes but more malevolent purposes include criminal activity and government surveillance. The images are automatically analysed by machine learning algorithms. Notably, deep convolutional neural networks perform very well at identifying image classes. Obviously, the images could be encrypted before storing to cloud platforms and then decrypted after downloading. This would certainly obfuscate the images. However, many users prefer to be able to peruse the images on the cloud platform. This creates a difficult problem in which users prefer images stored in a way so that a human can understand them but machine learning algorithms cannot. This paper proposes a novel technique, termed seam doppelganger, for formatting images using seam carving to identify seams for replacement. The approach degrades typical image classification performance in order to provide privacy while leaving the image human-understandable. Furthermore, the technique can be largely reversed providing a reasonable facsimile of the original image. Using the ImageNet database for birds, we show how the approach degrades a state-of-the-art residual network (ResNet50) for various amounts of seam replacements.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Pope J. and Terwilliger M. (2021). Seam Carving for Image Classification Privacy.In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM, ISBN 978-989-758-486-2, pages 268-274. DOI: 10.5220/0010249702680274

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icpram21,
author={James Pope and Mark Terwilliger},
title={Seam Carving for Image Classification Privacy},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM,},
year={2021},
pages={268-274},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010249702680274},
isbn={978-989-758-486-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM,
TI - Seam Carving for Image Classification Privacy
SN - 978-989-758-486-2
AU - Pope J.
AU - Terwilliger M.
PY - 2021
SP - 268
EP - 274
DO - 10.5220/0010249702680274