Privacy-Preserving Semantic Segmentation without Key Management

arXiv cs.CV / 4/21/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces a privacy-preserving semantic segmentation approach that encrypts data so training and inference occur on encrypted images.
  • It enables independent, locally generated encryption keys for each client and each image, reducing the need for centralized key management.
  • To address accuracy/performance degradation from encryption, the method applies an image encryption strategy during model training and also generates encrypted test images.
  • Experiments on the Cityscapes dataset using a vision transformer-based model (SETR) validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel privacy-preserving semantic segmentation method that can use independent keys for each client and image. In the proposed method, the model creator and each client encrypt images using locally generated keys, and model training and inference are conducted on the encrypted images. To mitigate performance degradation, an image encryption method is applied to model training in addition to the generation of test images. In experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed on the Cityscapes dataset under the use of a vision transformer-based model, called SETR.