Exploring Causes of Demographic Variations In Face Recognition Accuracy

In recent years, media reports have called out bias and racism in face recognition technology. We review experimental results exploring several speculated causes for asymmetric cross-demographic performance. We consider accuracy differences as represented by variations in non-mated (impostor) and / or mated (genuine) distributions for 1-to-1 face matching. Possible causes explored include differences in skin tone, face size and shape, imbalance in number of identities and images in the training data, and amount of face visible in the test data ("face pixels"). We find that demographic differences in face pixel information of the test images appear to most directly impact the resultant differences in face recognition accuracy.

img2pose: Face Alignment and Detection via 6DoF, Face Pose Estimation

We propose real-time, six degrees of freedom (6DoF), 3D face pose estimation without face detection or landmark localization. We observe that estimating the 6DoF rigid transformation of a face is a simpler problem than facial landmark detection, often used for 3D face alignment. In addition, 6DoF offers more information than face bounding box labels. We leverage these observations to make multiple contributions: (a) We describe an easily trained, efficient, Faster R-CNN--based model which regresses 6DoF pose for all faces in the photo, without preliminary face detection. (b) We explain how pose is converted and kept consistent between the input photo and arbitrary crops created while training and evaluating our model. (c) Finally, we show how face poses can replace detection bounding box training labels. Tests on AFLW2000-3D and BIWI show that our method runs at real-time and outperforms state of the art (SotA) face pose estimators. Remarkably, our method also surpasses SotA models of comparable complexity on the WIDER FACE detection benchmark, despite not been optimized on bounding box labels.

Characterizing the Variability in Face Recognition Accuracy Relative to Race

Many recent news headlines have labeled face recognition technology as biased or racist. We report on a methodical investigation into differences in face recognition accuracy between African-American and Caucasian image cohorts of the MORPH dataset. We find that, for all four matchers considered, the impostor and the genuine distributions are statistically significantly different between cohorts. For a fixed decision threshold, the African-American image cohort has a higher false match rate and a lower false non-match rate. ROC curves compare verification rates at the same false match rate, but the different cohorts achieve the same false match rate at different thresholds. This means that ROC comparisons are not relevant to operational scenarios that use a fixed decision threshold. We show that, for the ResNet matcher, the two cohorts have approximately equal separation of impostor and genuine distributions. Using ICAO compliance as a standard of image quality, we find that the initial image cohorts have unequal rates of good quality images. The ICAO-compliant subsets of the original image cohorts show improved accuracy, with the main effect being to reducing the low-similarity tail of the genuine distributions.