Identifying private content for online image sharing

Abstract

Images today are increasingly shared online on social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, and Instagram. Image sharing occurs not only within a group of friends but also more and more outside a user's social circles for purposes of social discovery. Despite that current social networking sites allow users to change their privacy preferences, this is often a cumbersome task for the vast majority of users on the Web, who face difficulties in assigning and managing privacy settings. When these privacy settings are used inappropriately, online image sharing can potentially lead to unwanted disclosures and privacy violations. Thus, automatically predicting images' privacy to warn users about private or sensitive content before uploading these images on social networking sites has become a necessity in our current interconnected world.

In this dissertation, we first, explore learning models to automatically predict appropriate images' privacy as private or public using carefully identified image-specific features. We study deep visual semantic features that are derived from various layers of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as well as textual features such as user tags and deep tags generated from deep CNNs. Particularly, we extract deep (visual and tag) features from four pre-trained CNN architectures for object recognition, i.e., AlexNet, GoogLeNet, VGG-16, and ResNet, and compare their performance for image privacy prediction. Results of our experiments on a Flickr dataset of over thirty thousand images show that the learning models trained on features extracted from ResNet outperform the state-of-the-art models for image privacy prediction. We further investigate the combination of user tags and deep tags derived from CNN architectures using two settings: (1) SVM on the bag-of-tags features; and (2) text-based CNN. We compare these models with the models trained on ResNet visual features obtained for privacy prediction.

Further, we present a privacy-aware approach to automatic image tagging, which aims at improving the quality of user annotations, while also preserving the images' original privacy sharing patterns. Experimental results show that, although the user-input tags comprise noise, our privacy-aware approach is able to predict accurate tags that can improve the performance of a downstream application on image privacy prediction, and outperforms an existing privacy-oblivious approach to image tagging. Crowd-sourcing the predicted tags exhibits the quality of our privacy-aware recommended tags. Finally, we propose an approach for fusing object, scene context, and image tags modalities derived from convolutional neural networks for accurately predicting the privacy of images shared online. Specifically, our approach identifies the set of most competent modalities on the fly, according to each new target image whose privacy has to be predicted. Experimental results show that our approach predicts the sensitive (or private) content more accurately than the models trained on individual modalities (object, scene, and tags) and prior privacy prediction works. Additionally, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines that also yield combinations of modalities.