Realistic Face Reconstruction from Facial Embeddings via Diffusion Models
2026-02-13 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how private face recognition systems might still leak personal information. They created a new method called face embedding mapping (FEM) that can turn hidden face data (embeddings) back into clear face images using a special neural network and a pre-trained model. Their experiments showed that these reconstructed faces could fool other face recognition systems, even when only partial or protected data was used. This method can help check how safe face recognition technology is against privacy leaks.
face recognitionprivacy-preserving face recognitionface embeddingsface reconstructionKolmogorov-Arnold Networkidentity-preserving diffusion modelprivacy leakageneural networksembedding-to-face attack
Authors
Dong Han, Yong Li, Joachim Denzler
Abstract
With the advancement of face recognition (FR) systems, privacy-preserving face recognition (PPFR) systems have gained popularity for their accurate recognition, enhanced facial privacy protection, and robustness to various attacks. However, there are limited studies to further verify privacy risks by reconstructing realistic high-resolution face images from embeddings of these systems, especially for PPFR. In this work, we propose the face embedding mapping (FEM), a general framework that explores Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) for conducting the embedding-to-face attack by leveraging pre-trained Identity-Preserving diffusion model against state-of-the-art (SOTA) FR and PPFR systems. Based on extensive experiments, we verify that reconstructed faces can be used for accessing other real-word FR systems. Besides, the proposed method shows the robustness in reconstructing faces from the partial and protected face embeddings. Moreover, FEM can be utilized as a tool for evaluating safety of FR and PPFR systems in terms of privacy leakage. All images used in this work are from public datasets.