ToonerGAN: Reinforcing GANs for Obfuscating Automated Facial Indexing

Kartik Thakral, Shashikant Prasad, Stuti Aswani, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 10875-10884

The rapid evolution of automatic facial indexing tech- nologies increases the risk of compromising personal and sensitive information. To address the issue we propose cre- ating cartoon avatars or 'toon avatars' designed to effec- tively obscure identity features. The primary objective is to deceive current AI systems preventing them from accu- rately identifying individuals while making minimal modi- fications to their facial features. Moreover we aim to en- sure that a human observer can still recognize the person depicted in these altered avatar images. To achieve this we introduce 'ToonerGAN' a novel approach that utilizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to craft person- alized cartoon avatars. The ToonerGAN framework con- sists of a style module and a de-identification module that work together to produce high-resolution realistic cartoon images. For the efficient training of our network we have developed an extensive dataset named 'ToonSet' compris- ing approximately 23000 facial images and their cartoon renditions. Through comprehensive experiments and bench- marking against existing datasets including CelebA-HQ our method demonstrates superior performance in obfus- cating identity while preserving the utility of data. Addi- tionally a user-centric study to explore the effectiveness of ToonerGAN has yielded some compelling observations.