Privacy Beyond Pixels: Latent Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Video Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fioresi, Joseph, Dave, Ishan Rajendrakumar, Shah, Mubarak
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fioresi, Joseph
Dave, Ishan Rajendrakumar
Shah, Mubarak
author_facet Fioresi, Joseph
Dave, Ishan Rajendrakumar
Shah, Mubarak
contents We introduce a novel formulation of visual privacy preservation for video foundation models that operates entirely in the latent space. While spatio-temporal features learned by foundation models have deepened general understanding of video content, sharing or storing these extracted visual features for downstream tasks inadvertently reveals sensitive personal information like skin color, gender, or clothing. Current privacy preservation methods focus on input-pixel-level anonymization, which requires retraining the entire utility video model and results in task-specific anonymization, making them unsuitable for recent video foundational models. To address these challenges, we introduce a lightweight Anonymizing Adapter Module (AAM) that removes private information from video features while retaining general task utility. AAM can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion to frozen video encoders, minimizing the computational burden of finetuning and re-extracting features. Our framework employs three newly designed training objectives: (1) a clip-level self-supervised privacy objective to reduce mutual information between static clips, (2) a co-training objective to retain utility across seen tasks, and (3) a latent consistency loss for generalization on unseen tasks. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a significant 35% reduction in privacy leakage while maintaining near-baseline utility performance across various downstream tasks: Action Recognition (Kinetics400, UCF101, HMDB51), Temporal Action Detection (THUMOS14), and Anomaly Detection (UCF-Crime). We also provide an analysis on anonymization for sensitive temporal attribute recognition. Additionally, we propose new protocols for assessing gender bias in action recognition models, showing that our method effectively mitigates such biases and promotes more equitable video understanding. https://joefioresi718.github.io/SPLAVU_webpage/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_08666
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Privacy Beyond Pixels: Latent Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Video Understanding
Fioresi, Joseph
Dave, Ishan Rajendrakumar
Shah, Mubarak
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We introduce a novel formulation of visual privacy preservation for video foundation models that operates entirely in the latent space. While spatio-temporal features learned by foundation models have deepened general understanding of video content, sharing or storing these extracted visual features for downstream tasks inadvertently reveals sensitive personal information like skin color, gender, or clothing. Current privacy preservation methods focus on input-pixel-level anonymization, which requires retraining the entire utility video model and results in task-specific anonymization, making them unsuitable for recent video foundational models. To address these challenges, we introduce a lightweight Anonymizing Adapter Module (AAM) that removes private information from video features while retaining general task utility. AAM can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion to frozen video encoders, minimizing the computational burden of finetuning and re-extracting features. Our framework employs three newly designed training objectives: (1) a clip-level self-supervised privacy objective to reduce mutual information between static clips, (2) a co-training objective to retain utility across seen tasks, and (3) a latent consistency loss for generalization on unseen tasks. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a significant 35% reduction in privacy leakage while maintaining near-baseline utility performance across various downstream tasks: Action Recognition (Kinetics400, UCF101, HMDB51), Temporal Action Detection (THUMOS14), and Anomaly Detection (UCF-Crime). We also provide an analysis on anonymization for sensitive temporal attribute recognition. Additionally, we propose new protocols for assessing gender bias in action recognition models, showing that our method effectively mitigates such biases and promotes more equitable video understanding. https://joefioresi718.github.io/SPLAVU_webpage/
title Privacy Beyond Pixels: Latent Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Video Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08666