# VerA: Versatile Anonymization Applicable to Clinical Facial Photographs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02124 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02124/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [HyperNetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09106/) (2016)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [Learning Face Representation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7923/) (2014)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (2020)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [SEAN: Image Synthesis with Semantic Region-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12861/) (2019)
- [ReStyle: A Residual-Based StyleGAN Encoder via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02699/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Blind Face Restoration with Codebook Lookup Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11253/) (2022)
- [MAT: Mask-Aware Transformer for Large Hole Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15270/) (2022)
- [HyperStyle: StyleGAN Inversion with HyperNetworks for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15666/) (2021)
- [High-Fidelity GAN Inversion for Image Attribute Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06590/) (2021)
- [General Facial Representation Learning in a Visual-Linguistic Manner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03109/) (2021)
- [Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation Without Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00925/) (2017)
- [Semantic Segmentation with Generative Models: Semi-Supervised Learning and Strong Out-of-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05833/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The demand for privacy in facial image dissemination is gaining ground internationally, echoed by the proliferation of regulations such as GDPR, DPDPA, CCPA, PIPL, and APPI. While recent advances in anonymization surpass pixelation or blur methods, additional constraints to the task pose challenges. Largely unaddressed by current anonymization methods are clinical images and pairs of before-and-after clinical images illustrating facial medical interventions, e.g., facial surgeries or dental procedures. We present VerA, the first Versatile Anonymization framework that solves two challenges in clinical applications: A) it preserves selected semantic areas (e.g., mouth region) to show medical intervention results, that is, anonymization is only applied to the areas outside the preserved area; and B) it produces anonymized images with consistent personal identity across multiple photographs, which is crucial for anonymizing photographs of the same person taken before and after a clinical intervention. We validate our results on both single and paired anonymization of clinical images through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We also demonstrate that VerA reaches the state of the art on established anonymization tasks, in terms of photorealism and de-identification.