  Reliable facial expression recognition plays a critical role in human-machine
interactions. However, most of the facial expression analysis methodologies
proposed to date pay little or no attention to the protection of a user's
privacy. In this paper, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Representation-Learning
Variational Generative Adversarial Network (PPRL-VGAN) to learn an image
representation that is explicitly disentangled from the identity information.
At the same time, this representation is discriminative from the standpoint of
facial expression recognition and generative as it allows expression-equivalent
face image synthesis. We evaluate the proposed model on two public datasets
under various threat scenarios. Quantitative and qualitative results
demonstrate that our approach strikes a balance between the preservation of
privacy and data utility. We further demonstrate that our model can be
effectively applied to other tasks such as expression morphing and image
completion.
