Hide-and-seek: face recognition in private

Recent trend towards cloud computing and outsourcing has led to the requirement for face recognition (FR) to be performed remotely by third-party servers. When outsourcing the FR, client's test image and classification result will be revealed to the servers. Within this context, we propose a novel privacy-preserving (PP) FR algorithm based on randomization. Existing PP FR algorithms are based on homomorphic encryption (HE) which requires higher computational power and communication bandwidth. Since we use randomization, the proposed algorithm outperforms the HE based algorithm in terms of computational and communication complexity. We validated our algorithm using popular ORL database. Experimental results demonstrate that accuracy of the proposed algorithm is the same as the accuracy of existing algorithms, while improving the computational efficiency by 120 times and communication complexity by 2.5 times against the existing HE based approach.