# A Study of Face Obfuscation in ImageNet

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06191 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06191/

## Key facts

- Cited by 83 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 100 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07805/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [The Secret Sharer: Evaluating and Testing Unintended Memorization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08232/) (2018)
- [Exploiting Unintended Feature Leakage in Collaborative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04049/) (2018)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [Data and its (dis)contents: A survey of dataset development and use in machine learning research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05345/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02609/) (2022)
- [RedCaps: web-curated image-text data created by the people, for the people](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11431/) (2021)
- [Emu: Generative Pretraining in Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05222/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Descriptions of Deep Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11114/) (2022)
- [Understanding and Evaluating Racial Biases in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08503/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Large Language Model from A Data-centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16640/) (2024)
- [Training-free Linear Image Inverses via Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04432/) (2023)
- [On Improving Adversarial Transferability of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04169/) (2021)
- [Privacy-Preserving Portrait Matting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14222/) (2021)
- [From Pixels to Prose: A Large Dataset of Dense Image Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10328/) (2024)
- [PASS: An ImageNet replacement for self-supervised pretraining without humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13228/) (2021)
- [GeoDE: a Geographically Diverse Evaluation Dataset for Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02560/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Dataset Harms Requires Stewardship: Lessons from 1000 Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02922/) (2021)
- [Towards Privacy-Aware Sign Language Translation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09611/) (2024)
- [Generative Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Review and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11029/) (2024)
- [ModelDiff: A Framework for Comparing Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12491/) (2022)
- [Guillotine Regularization: Why removing layers is needed to improve generalization in Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13378/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Portrait Matting with Privacy Preserving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16828/) (2022)
- [Bugs in the Data: How ImageNet Misrepresents Biodiversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11695/) (2022)
- [High-performance deep spiking neural networks with 0.3 spikes per neuron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08744/) (2023)
- [Bamboo: Building Mega-Scale Vision Dataset Continually with Human-Machine Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07845/) (2022)
- [Visual Atoms: Pre-training Vision Transformers with Sinusoidal Waves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01112/) (2023)
- [A Framework for Deprecating Datasets: Standardizing Documentation, Identification, and Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04424/) (2021)
- [Improving Federated Learning Face Recognition via Privacy-Agnostic Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12467/) (2022)
- [Ethical Considerations for Responsible Data Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03629/) (2023)
- [The Curse of Conditions: Analyzing and Improving Optimal Transport for Conditional Flow-Based Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10636/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face obfuscation (blurring, mosaicing, etc.) has been shown to be effective for privacy protection; nevertheless, object recognition research typically assumes access to complete, unobfuscated images. In this paper, we explore the effects of face obfuscation on the popular ImageNet challenge visual recognition benchmark. Most categories in the ImageNet challenge are not people categories; however, many incidental people appear in the images, and their privacy is a concern. We first annotate faces in the dataset. Then we demonstrate that face obfuscation has minimal impact on the accuracy of recognition models. Concretely, we benchmark multiple deep neural networks on obfuscated images and observe that the overall recognition accuracy drops only slightly (<= 1.0%). Further, we experiment with transfer learning to 4 downstream tasks (object recognition, scene recognition, face attribute classification, and object detection) and show that features learned on obfuscated images are equally transferable. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of privacy-aware visual recognition, improves the highly-used ImageNet challenge benchmark, and suggests an important path for future visual datasets. Data and code are available at https://github.com/princetonvisualai/imagenet-face-obfuscation.