Coordinate-wise monotonic transformations enable privacy-preserving age estimation with 3D face point cloud  

作　　者：Xinyu Yang Runhan Li Xindi Yang Yong Zhou Yi Liu Jing-Dong J.Han 

机构地区：[1]School of Life Sciences,Peking University,Beijing 100871,China [2]Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences,Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies,Center for Quantitative Biology(CQB),Peking University,Beijing 100871,China [3]Beijing Key Lab of Traffic Data Analysis and Mining,School of Computer and Information Technology,Beijing Jiaotong University,Beijing 100044,China [4]Clinical Research Institute,Shanghai General Hospital,Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine,Shanghai 200025,China

出　　处：《Science China(Life Sciences)》2024年第7期1489-1501,共13页中国科学（生命科学英文版）

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(92049302,92374207,32088101,32330017);the National Key Research and Development Program of China(2020YFA0804000)。

摘　　要：The human face is a valuable biomarker of aging,but the collection and use of its image raise significant privacy concerns.Here we present an approach for facial data masking that preserves age-related features using coordinate-wise monotonic transformations.We first develop a deep learning model that estimates age directly from non-registered face point clouds with high accuracy and generalizability.We show that the model learns a highly indistinguishable mapping using faces treated with coordinate-wise monotonic transformations,indicating that the relative positioning of facial information is a low-level biomarker of facial aging.Through visual perception tests and computational3D face verification experiments,we demonstrate that transformed faces are significantly more difficult to perceive for human but not for machines,except when only the face shape information is accessible.Our study leads to a facial data protection guideline that has the potential to broaden public access to face datasets with minimized privacy risks.

关 键 词：face point cloud age estimation face verification PRIVACY coordinate-wise monotonic transformation 

分 类 号：TP309[自动化与计算机技术—计算机系统结构] TP391.41[自动化与计算机技术—计算机科学与技术]