DiffAM: Diffusion-based Adversarial Makeup Transfer for Facial Privacy Protection

With the rapid development of face recognition (FR) systems, the privacy of face images on social media is facing severe challenges due to the abuse of unauthorized FR systems. Some studies utilize adversarial attack techniques to defend against malicious FR systems by generating adversarial examples. However, the generated adversarial examples, i.e., the protected face images, tend to suffer from subpar visual quality and low transferability. In this paper, we propose a novel face protection approach, dubbed DiffAM, which leverages the powerful generative ability of diffusion models to generate high-quality protected face images with adversarial makeup transferred from reference images. To be specific, we first introduce a makeup removal module to generate non-makeup images utilizing a fine-tuned diffusion model with guidance of textual prompts in CLIP space. As the inverse process of makeup transfer, makeup removal can make it easier to establish the deterministic relationship between makeup domain and non-makeup domain regardless of elaborate text prompts. Then, with this relationship, a CLIP-based makeup loss along with an ensemble attack strategy is introduced to jointly guide the direction of adversarial makeup domain, achieving the generation of protected face images with natural-looking makeup and high black-box transferability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffAM achieves higher visual quality and attack success rates with a gain of 13.14% under black-box setting compared with the state of the arts.