# Face De-identification: State-of-the-art Methods and Comparative Studies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09863 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09863/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 92 of its 209 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [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)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07204/) (2017)
- [The Limitations of Deep Learning in Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07528/) (2015)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Examples: Attacks and Defenses for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07107/) (2017)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [AttGAN: Facial Attribute Editing by Only Changing What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10678/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [NullFace: Training-Free Localized Face Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08478/) (2025)
- [Reverse Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22984/) (2025)
- [On the Importance of Conditioning for Privacy-Preserving Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05849/) (2025)
- [Patch-based Automatic Rosacea Detection Using the ResNet Deep Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09841/) (2025)
- [PerFace: Metric Learning in Perceptual Facial Similarity for Enhanced Face Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20281/) (2025)
- [Investigating Adversarial Robustness against Preprocessing used in Blackbox Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17169/) (2025)
- [Face anonymization preserving facial expressions and photometric realism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17567/) (2026)
- [Seeing Without Exposing: Adaptive Privacy Control for Open-World, Context-Hungry MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07175/) (2026)
- [Face De-Identification: A Domain-Centric Survey from Capture to Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25926/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The widespread use of image acquisition technologies, along with advances in facial recognition, has raised serious privacy concerns. Face de-identification usually refers to the process of concealing or replacing personal identifiers, which is regarded as an effective means to protect the privacy of facial images. A significant number of methods for face de-identification have been proposed in recent years. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art face de-identification methods, categorized into three levels: pixel-level, representation-level, and semantic-level techniques. We systematically evaluate these methods based on two key criteria, the effectiveness of privacy protection and preservation of image utility, highlighting their advantages and limitations. Our analysis includes qualitative and quantitative comparisons of the main algorithms, demonstrating that deep learning-based approaches, particularly those using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models, have achieved significant advancements in balancing privacy and utility. Experimental results reveal that while recent methods demonstrate strong privacy protection, trade-offs remain in visual fidelity and computational complexity. This survey not only summarizes the current landscape but also identifies key challenges and future research directions in face de-identification.