Is Facial Recognition Biased at Near-Infrared Spectrum As Well?

Published academic research and media articles suggest face recognition is biased across demographics. Specifically, unequal performance is obtained for women, dark-skinned people, and older adults. However, these published studies have examined the bias of facial recognition in the visible spectrum (VIS). Factors such as facial makeup, facial hair, skin color, and illumination variation have been attributed to the bias of this technology at the VIS. The near-infrared (NIR) spectrum offers an advantage over the VIS in terms of robustness to factors such as illumination changes, facial makeup, and skin color. Therefore, it is worthwhile to investigate the bias of facial recognition at the near-infrared spectrum (NIR). This first study investigates the bias of the face recognition systems at the NIR spectrum. To this aim, two popular NIR facial image datasets namely, CASIA-Face-Africa and Notre-Dame-NIVL consisting of African and Caucasian subjects, respectively, are used to investigate the bias of facial recognition technology across gender and race. Interestingly, experimental results suggest equitable face recognition performance across gender and race at the NIR spectrum.

Investigating Fairness of Ocular Biometrics Among Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults

A number of studies suggest bias of the face biometrics, i.e., face recognition and soft-biometric estimation methods, across gender, race, and age groups. There is a recent urge to investigate the bias of different biometric modalities toward the deployment of fair and trustworthy biometric solutions. Ocular biometrics has obtained increased attention from academia and industry due to its high accuracy, security, privacy, and ease of use in mobile devices. A recent study in $2020$ also suggested the fairness of ocular-based user recognition across males and females. This paper aims to evaluate the fairness of ocular biometrics in the visible spectrum among age groups; young, middle, and older adults. Thanks to the availability of the latest large-scale 2020 UFPR ocular biometric dataset, with subjects acquired in the age range 18 - 79 years, to facilitate this study. Experimental results suggest the overall equivalent performance of ocular biometrics across gender and age groups in user verification and gender classification. Performance difference for older adults at lower false match rate and young adults was noted at user verification and age classification, respectively. This could be attributed to inherent characteristics of the biometric data from these age groups impacting specific applications, which suggest a need for advancement in sensor technology and software solutions.

Probing Fairness of Mobile Ocular Biometrics Methods Across Gender on VISOB 2.0 Dataset

Recent research has questioned the fairness of face-based recognition and attribute classification methods (such as gender and race) for dark-skinned people and women. Ocular biometrics in the visible spectrum is an alternate solution over face biometrics, thanks to its accuracy, security, robustness against facial expression, and ease of use in mobile devices. With the recent COVID-19 crisis, ocular biometrics has a further advantage over face biometrics in the presence of a mask. However, fairness of ocular biometrics has not been studied till now. This first study aims to explore the fairness of ocular-based authentication and gender classification methods across males and females. To this aim, VISOB $2.0$ dataset, along with its gender annotations, is used for the fairness analysis of ocular biometrics methods based on ResNet-50, MobileNet-V2 and lightCNN-29 models. Experimental results suggest the equivalent performance of males and females for ocular-based mobile user-authentication in terms of genuine match rate (GMR) at lower false match rates (FMRs) and an overall Area Under Curve (AUC). For instance, an AUC of 0.96 for females and 0.95 for males was obtained for lightCNN-29 on an average. However, males significantly outperformed females in deep learning based gender classification models based on ocular-region.

Understanding Fairness of Gender Classification Algorithms Across Gender-Race Groups

Automated gender classification has important applications in many domains, such as demographic research, law enforcement, online advertising, as well as human-computer interaction. Recent research has questioned the fairness of this technology across gender and race. Specifically, the majority of the studies raised the concern of higher error rates of the face-based gender classification system for darker-skinned people like African-American and for women. However, to date, the majority of existing studies were limited to African-American and Caucasian only. The aim of this paper is to investigate the differential performance of the gender classification algorithms across gender-race groups. To this aim, we investigate the impact of (a) architectural differences in the deep learning algorithms and (b) training set imbalance, as a potential source of bias causing differential performance across gender and race. Experimental investigations are conducted on two latest large-scale publicly available facial attribute datasets, namely, UTKFace and FairFace. The experimental results suggested that the algorithms with architectural differences varied in performance with consistency towards specific gender-race groups. For instance, for all the algorithms used, Black females (Black race in general) always obtained the least accuracy rates. Middle Eastern males and Latino females obtained higher accuracy rates most of the time. Training set imbalance further widens the gap in the unequal accuracy rates across all gender-race groups. Further investigations using facial landmarks suggested that facial morphological differences due to the bone structure influenced by genetic and environmental factors could be the cause of the least performance of Black females and Black race, in general.

BWCFace: Open-set Face Recognition using Body-worn Camera

With computer vision reaching an inflection point in the past decade, face recognition technology has become pervasive in policing, intelligence gathering, and consumer applications. Recently, face recognition technology has been deployed on bodyworn cameras to keep officers safe, enabling situational awareness and providing evidence for trial. However, limited academic research has been conducted on this topic using traditional techniques on datasets with small sample size. This paper aims to bridge the gap in the state-of-the-art face recognition using bodyworn cameras (BWC). To this aim, the contribution of this work is two-fold: (1) collection of a dataset called BWCFace consisting of a total of 178K facial images of 132 subjects captured using the body-worn camera in in-door and daylight conditions, and (2) open-set evaluation of the latest deep-learning-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures combined with five different loss functions for face identification, on the collected dataset. Experimental results on our BWCFace dataset suggest a maximum of 33.89% Rank-1 accuracy obtained when facial features are extracted using SENet-50 trained on a large scale VGGFace2 facial image dataset. However, performance improved up to a maximum of 99.00% Rank-1 accuracy when pretrained CNN models are fine-tuned on a subset of identities in our BWCFace dataset. Equivalent performances were obtained across body-worn camera sensor models used in existing face datasets. The collected BWCFace dataset and the pretrained/ fine-tuned algorithms are publicly available to promote further research and development in this area. A downloadable link of this dataset and the algorithms is available by contacting the authors.