HIPP: Protecting Image Privacy via High-Quality Reversible Protected Version

Abstract

With the rapid development of the internet, sharing photos through Social Network Platforms (SNPs) has become a new way for people to socialize, which poses serious threats to personal privacy. Recently, a thumbnail-preserving image privacy protection technique has emerged and garnered widespread attention. However, the existing schemes based on this technique often introduce noticeable noise into the protected image, resulting in poor visual quality. Motivated by the observation that a latent vector can be decoupled into the detail and contour components, in this paper, we propose HIPP, a thumbnail-preserving image privacy protection scheme that decouples the detail and contour information contained in the latent vector corresponding to the original image and reconstructs details by generation model. As a result, the generated protected image appears natural and has a thumbnail similar to the original one. Moreover, the protected images can be restored to versions that are indistinguishable from the original images. Experiments on CelebA, Helen, and LSUN datasets show that the SSIM between the restored and original images achieves 0.9899. Furthermore, compared to the previous works, HIPP achieves the lowest runtime and file expansion rate, with values of 0.07 seconds and 1.1046, respectively.