Beyond Visual Appearances: Privacy-sensitive Objects Identification via Hybrid Graph Reasoning

The Privacy-sensitive Object Identification (POI) task allocates bounding boxes for privacy-sensitive objects in a scene. The key to POI is settling an object's privacy class (privacy-sensitive or non-privacy-sensitive). In contrast to conventional object classes which are determined by the visual appearance of an object, one object's privacy class is derived from the scene contexts and is subject to various implicit factors beyond its visual appearance. That is, visually similar objects may be totally opposite in their privacy classes. To explicitly derive the objects' privacy class from the scene contexts, in this paper, we interpret the POI task as a visual reasoning task aimed at the privacy of each object in the scene. Following this interpretation, we propose the PrivacyGuard framework for POI. PrivacyGuard contains three stages. i) Structuring: an unstructured image is first converted into a structured, heterogeneous scene graph that embeds rich scene contexts. ii) Data Augmentation: a contextual perturbation oversampling strategy is proposed to create slightly perturbed privacy-sensitive objects in a scene graph, thereby balancing the skewed distribution of privacy classes. iii) Hybrid Graph Generation & Reasoning: the balanced, heterogeneous scene graph is then transformed into a hybrid graph by endowing it with extra "node-node" and "edge-edge" homogeneous paths. These homogeneous paths allow direct message passing between nodes or edges, thereby accelerating reasoning and facilitating the capturing of subtle context changes. Based on this hybrid graph... **For the full abstract, see the original paper.**