# Body Shape Privacy in Images: Understanding Privacy and Preventing Automatic Shape Extraction

## TL;DR

This paper investigates methods to prevent automatic body shape extraction from images, addressing privacy concerns by exploring strategies to manipulate shape estimation without altering the image's appearance.

## Contribution

It is the first to analyze and propose strategies for evading multi-stage body shape estimation methods while maintaining image realism.

## Key findings

- Effective manipulation strategies identified
- Shape estimation can be significantly disrupted
- Preservation of original image appearance achieved

## Abstract

Modern approaches to pose and body shape estimation have recently achieved strong performance even under challenging real-world conditions. Even from a single image of a clothed person, a realistic looking body shape can be inferred that captures a users' weight group and body shape type well. This opens up a whole spectrum of applications -- in particular in fashion -- where virtual try-on and recommendation systems can make use of these new and automatized cues. However, a realistic depiction of the undressed body is regarded highly private and therefore might not be consented by most people. Hence, we ask if the automatic extraction of such information can be effectively evaded. While adversarial perturbations have been shown to be effective for manipulating the output of machine learning models -- in particular, end-to-end deep learning approaches -- state of the art shape estimation methods are composed of multiple stages. We perform the first investigation of different strategies that can be used to effectively manipulate the automatic shape estimation while preserving the overall appearance of the original image.