VPR-Cloak: A First Look at Privacy Cloak Against Visual Place Recognition

With the rapid advancement of Visual Place Recognition (VPR) systems, their unauthorized use on social media images enables monitoring of individuals' daily movements, posing serious privacy risks. However, privacy protection for addressing these risks in VPR systems remains an underexplored area. While adversarial perturbations have been widely explored for visual privacy protection, existing methods still fail to simultaneously satisfy the black-box constraint, imperceptibility, and real-time performance required in realistic VPR privacy protection scenarios. In this paper, we present the first look at privacy protection in VPR systems and introduce VPR-Cloak, an efficient privacy-preserving network. We introduce a saliency-aware prior to identify decisive regions for place recognition and propose Saliency-Aware Prior Guided Perturbation Optimization (SAP-PO) to selectively optimize perturbation generation in these areas. To enhance imperceptibility, we further optimize perturbations in the frequency domain, meticulously refining high-frequency components of perturbations while preserving low-frequency structures essential for human perception. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and on various black-box VPR models verify that our method outperforms existing SOTA methods. Additionally, our method achieves a \textbf{15× speedup} in runtime compared to SOTA methods. We also validate the effectiveness of our method based on commercial APIs, including \textbf{Google and Microsoft Bing}, demonstrating the practical applicability in real-world scenarios. The code will be publicly available.