# Segmentations-Leak: Membership Inference Attacks and Defenses in Semantic Image Segmentation

Source: [Segmentations-Leak: Membership Inference Attacks and Defenses in Semantic Image Segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa68681e209131cea1be8c>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:36:00.183Z

Authors: Yang He, Shadi Rahimian, Bernt Schiele, Mario Fritz

Published: 2019-12-20T08:11:47.000Z

## Abstract

Today's success of state of the art methods for semantic segmentation is driven by large datasets. Data is considered an important asset that needs to be protected, as the collection and annotation of such datasets comes at significant efforts and associated costs. In addition, visual data might contain private or sensitive information, that makes it equally unsuited for public release. Unfortunately, recent work on membership inference in the broader area of adversarial machine learning and inference attacks on machine learning models has shown that even black box classifiers leak information on the dataset that they were trained on. We show that such membership inference attacks can be successfully carried out on complex, state of the art models for semantic segmentation. In order to mitigate the associated risks, we also study a series of defenses against such membership inference attacks and find effective counter measures against the existing risks with little effect on the utility of the segmentation method. Finally, we extensively evaluate our attacks and defenses on a range of relevant real-world datasets: Cityscapes, BDD100K, and Mapillary Vistas.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.09685>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.09685.pdf>)
