P-Blend: Privacy- and Utility-Preserving Blendshape Perturbation Against Re-identification Attacks in Virtual RealityShow others and affiliations
2025 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, ISSN 1077-2626, E-ISSN 1941-0506, Vol. 31, no 11, p. 9592-9602Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
In this paper, we propose p-Blend, an efficient and effective blendshape perturbation mechanism designed to defend against both intra- and cross-app re-identification attacks in virtual reality. p-Blend provides privacy protection when streaming blendshape data to third-party applications on VR devices. In its design, we consider both privacy and utility. p-Blend not only perturbs blendshape values to resist re-identification attacks but also preserves the smoothness of facial animations and the naturalness of facial expressions, ensuring the continued usability of the data. We validate the effectiveness of p-Blend through extensive empirical evaluations and user studies. Quantitative experiments on a large-scale dataset collected from 45 participants demonstrate that p-Blend significantly reduces re-identification accuracy across a range of machine learning models. While pure-random perturbation fails to prevent attacks that exploit statistical features, p-Blend effectively mitigates these risks in both raw and statistical blendshape data. Additionally, user study results show that facial animations generated from p-Blend-perturbed blendshapes maintain greater smoothness and naturalness compared to those using purely random perturbation. The codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/jingwei1016/p-Blend.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE Computer Society, 2025. Vol. 31, no 11, p. 9592-9602
Keywords [en]
blendshape, Privacy-preservation, virtual reality, Blending, Large datasets, Learning systems, Machine learning, Privacy-preserving techniques, Virtual environments, Blendshapes, Empirical evaluations, Facial animation, Facial Expressions, Privacy preservation, Privacy protection, Random perturbations, Re identifications, Third party application (Apps), User study
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:bth-28780DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3616736ISI: 001611096500004Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105018044839OAI: oai:DiVA.org:bth-28780DiVA, id: diva2:2007119
2025-10-172025-10-172025-11-24Bibliographically approved