Fabian Perez · Jhon Lopez · Henry Arguello

ICASSP 2024 Paper

In the era of cloud computing and data-driven applications, it is crucial to protect sensitive information to maintain data privacy, ensuring truly reliable systems. As a result, preserving privacy in deep learning systems has become a critical concern. Existing methods for privacy preservation rely on image encryption or perceptual transformation approaches.

However, they often suffer from reduced task performance and high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Privacy-Preserving framework that uses a set of deformable operators for secure task learning. Our method involves shuffling pixels during the analog-to-digital conversion process to generate visually protected data. Those are then fed into a well-known network enhanced with deformable operators. Using our approach, users can achieve equivalent performance to original images without additional training using a secret key.

Moreover, our method enables access control against unauthorized users. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, showcasing its potential in cloud-based scenarios and privacy-sensitive applications.

To validate the privacy protection of our approach, we evaluated the performance of the shuffled images for the classification task on the CIFAR-10 dataset

Also, we evaluated our per-formance of the proposed approach using a PreResNet-110 adapted to our method compared to state-of-the-art techniques for private image classification.

The codebase is structured as follows:

• checkpoints/: This directory is used to store model checkpoints during training

• experiments/: Contains subdirectories for different experiments like classification and segmentation.

  • classification/: Includes configuration files (conf.py), inference script (inference.py), and training and testing scripts for CIFAR-10 dataset (train_cifar10.py, test_cifar10.py).
  • segmentation/: Includes the same files as the classification directory but for segmentation tasks. will be added soon

• models/: Contains model definitions.

  • vgg.py: Standard VGG model.
  • vgg_deformable.py: VGG model with deformable layers.

• operators/: Includes custom layers or functions like deformable pooling, offset calculations, and scramblers.

  • deformable_pooling.py: Deformable pooling layer.
  • offset.py: Offset calculation for deformable layers.
  • scrambler.py: Pixel scrambler for images

• utils/: Utility functions for training and other tasks.

  • utils.py: General utility functions.
  • utils_train.py: Utilities specific to training processes.

To set up the environment for running the experiments, please follow these steps:

git clone https://github.com/Factral/PrivDL
cd PrivDL
pip install -r requirements.txt

To train a model on classification, run the following command

Non-privacy training

python3 train_cifar10.py -net "vgg16" -dataset "cifar10" -epochs 200 -save_weights -gpu

Privacy training

python3 train_cifar10.py -net "vgg16" -dataset "cifar10" -epochs 200 -permute -save_weights -gpu

To test a model on classification, run the following command:

Non-privacy testing

python3 test_cifar10.py -net "vgg16" -dataset "cifar10" -b 64 -seed 1312 -weights 'path-to-weights' 

Privacy testing

python3 test_cifar10.py -net "vgg16_permuted" -dataset "cifar10" -permute -b 64 -seed 1312 -weights 'path-to-weights'

To run inference on a single image, run the following command:

Non-privacy inference

python3 inference.py -net "vgg16" -weights 'path-to-weights' -image 'path-to-image'

privacy inference

python3 inference.py -net "vgg16_permuted" -permute -weights 'path-to-weights' -image 'path-to-image'

If you find this work useful, please consider citing our paper:

@INPROCEEDINGS{10446218,
  author={Perez, Fabian and Lopez, Jhon and Arguello, Henry},
  booktitle={ICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)}, 
  title={Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning Using Deformable Operators for Secure Task Learning}, 
  year={2024},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={5980-5984},
  keywords={Deep learning;Training;Privacy;Cloud computing;Encryption;Computational efficiency;Task analysis;Computational Imaging;Deformable Operators;Image Privacy;Image Encryption},
  doi={10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10446218}}