TOAP: Towards Better Robustness in Universal Transferable Anti-Facial Retrieval

Deep hash-based retrieval techniques are widely used in facial retrieval systems to improve the efficiency of facial matching. However, it also brings the risk of privacy leakage. Deep hash models are easily influenced by adversarial examples, which can be leveraged to prevent the malicious retrieval of private images. The existing adversarial example methods against deep hash models focus on universality and transferability, lacking the research on its robustness in online social networks (OSNs), which leads to their failure in anti-retrieval after post-processing. Therefore, we provide the first in-depth discussion on robustness adversarial perturbation in universal transferable anti-facial retrieval and propose Three-in-One Adversarial Perturbation (TOAP). Specifically, we firstly analyze the performance of deep hash models after post-processing and construct a local and global Compression Generator (CG) to simulate complex post-processing scenarios. Then, we explore the variation patterns of the model's objective under image post-processing and propose robust optimization objectives, cluster centers and data space centers, optimizing them using meta-learning. Finally, we iteratively optimize perturbation by alternately generating adversarial examples and fine-tuning the CG, balancing the performance of perturbation while enhancing CG's ability to mitigate them. Numerous experiments demonstrate that, in addition to its advantages in universality and transferability, TOAP significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in multiple robustness metrics. It further improves universality and transferability by 5% to 28%, and achieves up to about 33% significant improvement in several simulated post-processing scenarios as well as mainstream OSNs, demonstrating that TOAP can effectively protect private images from malicious retrieval in real-world scenarios.