# Learnable Privacy-Preserving Anonymization for Pedestrian Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.11677 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11677/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [Person Transfer GAN to Bridge Domain Gap for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08565/) (2017)
- [Omni-Scale Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00953/) (2019)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [A Strong Baseline and Batch Normalization Neck for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08332/) (2019)
- [DeepPrivacy: A Generative Adversarial Network for Face Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04538/) (2019)
- [CIAGAN: Conditional Identity Anonymization Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09544/) (2020)
- [A Study of Face Obfuscation in ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06191/) (2021)
- [Learning Generalisable Omni-Scale Representations for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06827/) (2019)
- [Learning to Anonymize Faces for Privacy Preserving Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11556/) (2018)
- [Natural and Effective Obfuscation by Head Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09001/) (2017)
- [AnonymousNet: Natural Face De-Identification with Measurable Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12620/) (2019)
- [Live Face De-Identification in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08348/) (2019)
- [A Hybrid Model for Identity Obfuscation by Face Replacement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04779/) (2018)
- [Perceptual Indistinguishability-Net (PI-Net): Facial Image Obfuscation with Manipulable Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01753/) (2021)
- [The UU-Net: Reversible Face De-Identification for Visual Surveillance Video Footage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04316/) (2020)
- [Privacy-Protective-GAN for Face De-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08906/) (2018)
- [Improving Person Re-Identification with Temporal Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09056/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Heterogeneous Federated Learning: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10616/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Knowledge Transfer for Scalable Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06016/) (2025)
- [PixelFade: Privacy-preserving Person Re-identification with Noise-guided Progressive Replacement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05543/) (2024)
- [A Dual-stage Prompt-driven Privacy-preserving Paradigm for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05092/) (2025)
- [ReGenHuman: Re-Generating Human Appearances for Realistic Full-Body Video Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14972/) (2026)
- [MIRAGE: Full-Body Bystander Privacy for Smart Glasses with Consent-Based Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24537/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper studies a novel privacy-preserving anonymization problem for pedestrian images, which preserves personal identity information (PII) for authorized models and prevents PII from being recognized by third parties. Conventional anonymization methods unavoidably cause semantic information loss, leading to limited data utility. Besides, existing learned anonymization techniques, while retaining various identity-irrelevant utilities, will change the pedestrian identity, and thus are unsuitable for training robust re-identification models. To explore the privacy-utility trade-off for pedestrian images, we propose a joint learning reversible anonymization framework, which can reversibly generate full-body anonymous images with little performance drop on person re-identification tasks. The core idea is that we adopt desensitized images generated by conventional methods as the initial privacy-preserving supervision and jointly train an anonymization encoder with a recovery decoder and an identity-invariant model. We further propose a progressive training strategy to improve the performance, which iteratively upgrades the initial anonymization supervision. Experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of our anonymized pedestrian images for privacy protection, which boosts the re-identification performance while preserving privacy. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/whuzjw/privacy-reid.