Digital Passport: A Novel Technological Strategy for Intellectual Property Protection of Convolutional Neural Networks

In order to prevent deep neural networks from being infringed by unauthorized parties, we propose a generic solution which embeds a designated digital passport into a network, and subsequently, either paralyzes the network functionalities for unauthorized usages or maintain its functionalities in the presence of a verified passport. Such a desired network behavior is successfully demonstrated in a number of implementation schemes, which provide reliable, preventive and timely protections against tens of thousands of fake-passport deceptions. Extensive experiments also show that the deep neural network performance under unauthorized usages deteriorate significantly (e.g. with 33% to 82% reductions of CIFAR10 classification accuracies), while networks endorsed with valid passports remain intact.