Natural Adversarial Mask for Face Identity Protection in Physical World

Facial recognition (FR) technology offers convenience in our daily lives, but it also raises serious privacy issues due to unauthorized FR applications. To protect facial privacy, existing methods have proposed adversarial face examples that can fool FR systems. However, most of these methods work only in the digital domain and do not consider natural physical protections. In this paper, we present NatMask, a 3D-based method for creating natural and realistic adversarial face masks that can preserve facial identity in the physical world. Our method utilizes 3D face reconstruction and differentiable rendering to generate 2D face images with natural-looking facial masks. Moreover, we propose an identity-aware style injection (IASI) method to improve the naturalness and transferability of the mask texture. We evaluate our method on two face datasets to verify its effectiveness in protecting face identity against four state-of-the-art (SOTA) FR models and three commercial FR APIs in both digital and physical domains under black-box impersonation and dodging strategies. Experiments show that our method can generate adversarial masks with superior naturalness and physical realizability to safeguard face identity, outperforming SOTA methods by a large margin.