# Now You See Me, Now You Don't: A Unified Framework for Expression Consistent Anonymization in Talking Head Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11635 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11635/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [Learning Face Representation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7923/) (2014)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [Motion Representations for Articulated Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11280/) (2021)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17694/) (2024)
- [Machine Learning with Membership Privacy using Adversarial Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05852/) (2018)
- [Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09043/) (2022)
- [DeepPrivacy: A Generative Adversarial Network for Face Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04538/) (2019)
- [X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15931/) (2024)
- [Protecting Facial Privacy: Generating Adversarial Identity Masks via Style-robust Makeup Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03121/) (2022)
- [Face Adapter for Pre-Trained Diffusion Models with Fine-Grained ID and Attribute Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12970/) (2024)
- [L2CS-Net: Fine-Grained Gaze Estimation in Unconstrained Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03339/) (2022)
- [Natural and Effective Obfuscation by Head Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09001/) (2017)
- [DeepPrivacy2: Towards Realistic Full-Body Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09454/) (2022)
- [Towards Privacy-Preserving Visual Recognition via Adversarial Training: A Pilot Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08379/) (2018)
- [Face Animation with an Attribute-Guided Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03199/) (2023)
- [Defeating Image Obfuscation with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.00408/) (2016)
- [Attribute-preserving Face Dataset Anonymization via Latent Code Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11296/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Unsafe2Safe: Controllable Image Anonymization for Downstream Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28605/) (2026)
- [Generative Anonymization in Event Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12803/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face video anonymization is aimed at privacy preservation while allowing for the analysis of videos in a number of computer vision downstream tasks such as expression recognition, people tracking, and action recognition. We propose here a novel unified framework referred to as Anon-NET, streamlined to de-identify facial videos, while preserving age, gender, race, pose, and expression of the original video. Specifically, we inpaint faces by a diffusion-based generative model guided by high-level attribute recognition and motion-aware expression transfer. We then animate deidentified faces by video-driven animation, which accepts the de-identified face and the original video as input. Extensive experiments on the datasets VoxCeleb2, CelebV-HQ, and HDTF, which include diverse facial dynamics, demonstrate the effectiveness of AnonNET in obfuscating identity while retaining visual realism and temporal consistency. The code of AnonNet will be publicly released.