Now You See Me, Now You Don't: A Unified Framework for Expression Consistent Anonymization in Talking Head Videos

Anil Egin, Andrea Tangherloni, Antitza Dantcheva; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2025, pp. 5984-5993

Face video anonymization is aimed at privacy preservation while allowing for the analysis of videos in a number of computer vision downstream tasks such as expression recognition, people tracking, and action recognition. We propose here a novel unified framework referred to as AnonNET, streamlined to de-identify a facial video, while preserving age, gender, race, pose, and expression of the original video. Specifically, we inpaint faces by a diffusion-based generative model guided by high-level attribute recognition and motion-aware expression transfer. We then animate de-identified faces by video-driven animation, which accepts the de-identified face and the original video as input. Extensive experiments on the datasets VoxCeleb2, CelebV-HQ, and HDTF, which include diverse facial dynamics, demonstrate the effectiveness of AnonNET in obfuscating identity while retaining visual realism and temporal consistency.