Facial Attribute Based Text Guided Face Anonymization

The increasing prevalence of computer vision applications necessitates handling vast amounts of visual data, often containing personal information. While this technology offers significant benefits, it should not compromise privacy. Data privacy regulations emphasize the need for individual consent for processing personal data, hindering researchers' ability to collect high-quality datasets containing the faces of the individuals. This paper presents a deep learning-based face anonymization pipeline to overcome this challenge. Unlike most of the existing methods, our method leverages recent advancements in diffusion-based inpainting models, eliminating the need for training Generative Adversarial Networks. The pipeline employs a three-stage approach: face detection with RetinaNet, feature extraction with VGG-Face, and realistic face generation using the state-of-the-art BrushNet diffusion model. BrushNet utilizes the entire image, face masks, and text prompts specifying desired facial attributes like age, ethnicity, gender, and expression. This enables the generation of natural-looking images with unrecognizable individuals, facilitating the creation of privacy-compliant datasets for computer vision research.

@article{muştu2025_2505.21002,
  title={ Facial Attribute Based Text Guided Face Anonymization },
  author={ Mustafa İzzet Muştu and Hazım Kemal Ekenel },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21002},
  year={ 2025 }
}