Racial Bias within Face Recognition: A Survey

Facial recognition is one of the most academically studied and industrially developed areas within computer vision where we readily find associated applications deployed globally. This widespread adoption has uncovered significant performance variation across subjects of different racial profiles leading to focused research attention on racial bias within face recognition spanning both current causation and future potential solutions. In support, this study provides an extensive taxonomic review of research on racial bias within face recognition exploring every aspect and stage of the face recognition processing pipeline. Firstly, we discuss the problem definition of racial bias, starting with race definition, grouping strategies, and the societal implications of using race or race-related groupings. Secondly, we divide the common face recognition processing pipeline into four stages: image acquisition, face localisation, face representation, face verification and identification, and review the relevant corresponding literature associated with each stage. The overall aim is to provide comprehensive coverage of the racial bias problem with respect to each and every stage of the face recognition processing pipeline whilst also highlighting the potential pitfalls and limitations of contemporary mitigation strategies that need to be considered within future research endeavours or commercial applications alike.

Measuring Hidden Bias within Face Recognition via Racial Phenotypes

Recent work reports disparate performance for intersectional racial groups across face recognition tasks: face verification and identification. However, the definition of those racial groups has a significant impact on the underlying findings of such racial bias analysis. Previous studies define these groups based on either demographic information (e.g. African, Asian etc.) or skin tone (e.g. lighter or darker skins). The use of such sensitive or broad group definitions has disadvantages for bias investigation and subsequent counter-bias solutions design. By contrast, this study introduces an alternative racial bias analysis methodology via facial phenotype attributes for face recognition. We use the set of observable characteristics of an individual face where a race-related facial phenotype is hence specific to the human face and correlated to the racial profile of the subject. We propose categorical test cases to investigate the individual influence of those attributes on bias within face recognition tasks. We compare our phenotype-based grouping methodology with previous grouping strategies and show that phenotype-based groupings uncover hidden bias without reliance upon any potentially protected attributes or ill-defined grouping strategies. Furthermore, we contribute corresponding phenotype attribute category labels for two face recognition tasks: RFW for face verification and VGGFace2 (test set) for face identification.

RSSI-based Outdoor Localization with Single Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Localization of a target object has been performed conventionally using multiple terrestrial reference nodes. This paradigm is recently shifted towards utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for locating target objects. Since locating of a target using simultaneous multiple UAVs is costly and impractical, achieving this task by utilizing single UAV becomes desirable. Hence, in this paper, we propose an RSSI-based localization method that utilizes only a single UAV. The proposed approach is based on clustering method along with the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The performance of the proposed method is verified by the experimental measurements collected by a UAV that we have designed and computer simulations. The results show that the proposed method can achieve location accuracy as low as 7m depending on the number of iterations.