CLIP2Protect: Protecting Facial Privacy using Text-Guided Makeup via
  Adversarial Latent Search
Authors: name: Fahad Shamshad, name: Muzammal Naseer, name: Karthik Nandakumar

The success of deep learning based face recognition systems has given rise to
serious privacy concerns due to their ability to enable unauthorized tracking
of users in the digital world. Existing methods for enhancing privacy fail to
generate naturalistic images that can protect facial privacy without
compromising user experience. We propose a novel two-step approach for facial
privacy protection that relies on finding adversarial latent codes in the
low-dimensional manifold of a pretrained generative model. The first step
inverts the given face image into the latent space and finetunes the generative
model to achieve an accurate reconstruction of the given image from its latent
code. This step produces a good initialization, aiding the generation of
high-quality faces that resemble the given identity. Subsequently, user-defined
makeup text prompts and identity-preserving regularization are used to guide
the search for adversarial codes in the latent space. Extensive experiments
demonstrate that faces generated by our approach have stronger black-box
transferability with an absolute gain of 12.06% over the state-of-the-art
facial privacy protection approach under the face verification task. Finally,
we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for commercial face
recognition systems. Our code is available at
https://github.com/fahadshamshad/Clip2Protect.