# Swapping Faces, Saving Features: A Dual-Purpose Pipeline for Pedestrian Privacy in ITS

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08402/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Blind Face Restoration with Codebook Lookup Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11253/) (2022)
- [Sample and Computation Redistribution for Efficient Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04714/) (2021)
- [CIAGAN: Conditional Identity Anonymization Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09544/) (2020)
- [DeepPrivacy2: Towards Realistic Full-Body Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09454/) (2022)
- [Gaze-LLE: Gaze Target Estimation via Large-Scale Learned Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09586/) (2024)
- [GHOST 2.0: generative high-fidelity one shot transfer of heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18417/) (2025)
- [VIT-Ped: Visionary Intention Transformer for Pedestrian Behavior Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01989/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale and diverse datasets are needed to train AI models to take real-time decisions for autonomous vehicles (AVs), an intelligent transportation system (ITS) application. Pedestrian intention and trajectory prediction are critical models used in AVs, requiring datasets involving diverse pedestrian images. Unrestricted access to these datasets imposes serious security risks, like identity theft and pedestrian tracking. The challenge is to apply privacy preservation procedures while maintaining the image attributes needed to train the models. Existing privacy methods may preserve the pedestrian's privacy, but degrade the image usability, which hinders the models' effectiveness. This work's focus is to implement a five-stage pipeline to protect pedestrians' privacy through face swapping while keeping the essential facial attributes intact. It should be tailored to satisfy the privacy needs of the Egy-DRiVeS dataset. Moreover, Roop and Ghost-v2 face-swapping models are evaluated. Provenly, Roop outperforms Ghost-v2 in various aspects, as will be discussed. Consequently, Roop is the face-swapping model to be used in the pipeline to strike the balance between pedestrian privacy via identity concealment and data usability via facial attribute preservation.