Inpainting, Deep Learning, and Anonymization
Anonymization Image recognition is one of the areas that Deep Learning excels at. It is, in fact, so good at it that these days you can pretty easily identify anyone from a photograph (especially if you’ve got a large enough corpus of identity information, like Facebook, Google, or, oh, the Feds). So, how d’you go about anonymizing pictures? Let’s make this legit — you’re the newspaper (look it up, it’s a thing), and you want to publish a picture of a witness in your ScoopOfTheYear™ along with the story. You’d probably do something like this picture, right? An image with a nicely blurred face, can’t make out who it is, etc. etc. Blurring: Not the Answer Well, you guessed wrong! Back in 2016, McPherson et al. (•) showed that you can uniquely identify people from these types of blurred images. (You’ve got to remember, Neural Networks don’t give a s**t about whether a thing is a “face” or not, it just matches away…). What’s even worse is that Shiri et al. (••) figured o...