PrivateMail: Supervised Manifold Learning of Deep Features with Privacy for Image Retrieval

Abstract

Differential Privacy offers strong guarantees such as immutable privacy under any post-processing. In this work, we propose a differentially private mechanism called PrivateMail for performing supervised manifold learning. We then apply it to the use case of private image retrieval to obtain nearest matches to a client’s target image from a server’s database. PrivateMail releases the target image as part of a differentially private manifold embedding. We give bounds on the global sensitivity of the manifold learning map in order to obfuscate and release embeddings with differential privacy inducing noise. We show that PrivateMail obtains a substantially better performance in terms of the privacy-utility trade off in comparison to several baselines on various datasets. We share code for applying PrivateMail at http://tiny.cc/PrivateMail.