# PerFace: Metric Learning in Perceptual Facial Similarity for Enhanced Face Anonymization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20281/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [Learning Face Representation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7923/) (2014)
- [AdaFace: Quality Adaptive Margin for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00964/) (2022)
- [MagFace: A Universal Representation for Face Recognition and Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06627/) (2021)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [SimSwap: An Efficient Framework For High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06340/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Face Representation by Joint Identification-Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4773/) (2014)
- [SynFace: Face Recognition with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07960/) (2021)
- [One Shot Face Swapping on Megapixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04932/) (2021)
- [HifiFace: 3D Shape and Semantic Prior Guided High Fidelity Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09965/) (2021)
- [DiffFace: Diffusion-based Face Swapping with Facial Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13344/) (2022)
- [BlendFace: Re-designing Identity Encoders for Face-Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10854/) (2023)
- [DeepID3: Face Recognition with Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00873/) (2015)
- [Deeply learned face representations are sparse, selective, and robust](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1265/) (2014)
- [Smooth-Swap: A Simple Enhancement for Face-Swapping with Smoothness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05907/) (2021)
- [Robust Face Recognition via Multimodal Deep Face Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00244/) (2015)
- [My Face My Choice: Privacy Enhancing Deepfakes for Social Media Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01361/) (2022)
- [Face De-identification: State-of-the-art Methods and Comparative Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09863/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In response to rising societal awareness of privacy concerns, face anonymization techniques have advanced, including the emergence of face-swapping methods that replace one identity with another. Achieving a balance between anonymity and naturalness in face swapping requires careful selection of identities: overly similar faces compromise anonymity, while dissimilar ones reduce naturalness. Existing models, however, focus on binary identity classification "the same person or not", making it difficult to measure nuanced similarities such as "completely different" versus "highly similar but different." This paper proposes a human-perception-based face similarity metric, creating a dataset of 6,400 triplet annotations and metric learning to predict the similarity. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in both face similarity prediction and attribute-based face classification tasks over existing methods.