Profile images from social networks are a valuable source of data for AI analytics, but they contain biometric identifiers that pose serious privacy risks. The current face anonymization techniques often destroy semantic information, and generative de-identification methods are vulnerable to re-identification attacks. In this paper, we propose a template-driven multimodal face pseudonymization framework that allows for the privacy-preserving analysis of facial image data while retaining analytically relevant attributes. Our approach uses a FaceNet-based CelebA attribute classifier to extract fine-grained facial attributes and a DeepFace model to extract high-level demographic attributes. Rather than relying on stochastic large language models, we introduce deterministic template-based attribute-to-text conversion to ensure consistency and reproducibility and prevent unintended attribute hallucination. The resulting textual description serves as the sole conditioning input for Janus-Pro, a multimodal text-to-image generation model that synthesizes realistic yet non-identifiable face images. We evaluate our method on the CelebA dataset under a strong adversarial threat model, employing state-of-the-art face recognition systems to assess re-identification and linkability attacks. Our results demonstrate a substantial reduction in identity leakage while preserving semantic attributes.
Lee et al. (Thu,) studied this question.