Researchers have develop an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can protect users from undesire facial scanning by bad actors. Chameleon, the AI model uses a special masking technology to generate a mask that hides faces in images without impacting the visual quality of the protected image.
Also, the researchers claim that the model is resource-optimise, making it usable even with limit processing power.
So far, the researchers have not gone public with the Chameleon AI model, but, they have state their intentions to release the code publicly soon.
In a research paper, publish in the online pre-print journal arXiv, researchers from Georgia Tech University detail the AI model.
This tool can add an invisible mask on faces in an image to make it imperceptible to facial recognition tools.
This way, you can protect their identity from facial data scanning attempts by bad actors and AI data-scrapping bots.
Ling Liu, professor of data and intelligence-powered computing at Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science, and the lead author of the research paper, said :
“Privacy-preserving data sharing and analytics like Chameleon will help to advance governance and responsible adoption of AI technology and stimulate responsible science and innovation,”.
Chameleon uses a special masking technique call as personalise privacy protection (P-3) mask.
When the mask has applied, the images cannot be detect by facial recognition tools as the scans will show them “as being someone else.”
As face masking tools already exist, the Chameleon AI model innovates on both resource optimisation and image quality perseverance.
To achieve the former, the researchers highlight that instead of using separate masks for each photo, the tool generates one mask per user based on a few user-submitted facial photos.
By this way, only a limited amount of processing power is require to generate the invisible mask.
The second challenge, which is to preserve the image quality of a protect photo, was trickier.
To solve this, researchers use a perceptibility optimisation technique in Chameleon.
It automatically renders the mask without any manual intervention or parameter setting, thus allowing the AI to not obfuscate the overall image quality.
Calling the AI model an important step towards privacy protection, the researchers reveal that they plan to release Chameleon’s code publicly on GitHub soon.
The open-source AI model can then be use by developers to build into applications.
