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Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You're a White Guy (nytimes.com)
Facial recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph. When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time. But the darker the skin, the more errors arise -- up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women, the New York Times reported, citing a new study. From the report: These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab, show how some of the biases in the real world can seep into artificial intelligence, the computer systems that inform facial recognition. In modern artificial intelligence, data rules. A.I. software is only as smart as the data used to train it. If there are many more white men than black women in the system, it will be worse at identifying the black women. One widely used facial-recognition data set was estimated to be more than 75 percent male and more than 80 percent white, according to another research study.
So, when the white guy struggles to differentiate black people with an "you all look the same to me" statement, it's automatically construed as racist and derogatory.
Has facial recognition validated that statement to hold more truth than previously assumed, or is this the fault of the programming behind it?
This reminds me of that ridiculous article (and accompanying video) saying that color film was biased towards white people. Around 3:30 in the video they have white and black people stand in front of a face-following camera and it doesn't work for the black people. Everyone acts like this is some sort of Harry Potter wizardry against the black man keeping him down when it's vastly simpler than that.
For progressively darker skin, progressively higher light on that skin is required to reveal its contours. The fundamental problem is that white and light-skinned brown people have their normal skin color shades in the midtones when a scene is properly exposed while darker-skinned brown and black people are closer to shadows. To expose properly for facial recognition of dark brown or black skin, you have to overexpose the midtones to bring up the shadows. Since people rarely take photos on purpose that are exposed for the shadows while blowing everything else out, it should be fairly obvious that facial recognition (and early ISO 32 color film and small-sensor cameras like webcams and phone cameras) will have a very hard time with dark skin. Sure, it could be a lack of data in some instances, but it's far more likely to be the fact that the skin absorbs more light and photographs are generally exposed too low to reveal enough detail for the machines to analyze.
If you think this is "racist" you're saying that the nature of light itself is racist. I don't feel like I should have to explain why that position is really stupid.
Most of the time these cameras would work just fine if they adjusted the exposure properly. They have auto exposure but it's tuned either for general photography or white skin.
The fix isn't that complex, and some kind of calibration could be done when setting up face recognition.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't really think that is true, but it is true you need different lighting to pick up the nuances in a black face. Movies and TV shows for years have lit black actors in ways that wash out their faces by using rules of thumb that work for white faces. It's only in the last few years that we're seeing black actors properly lit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Are there sources? We could provide sources for you all day.
https://www.alternet.org/civil...
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics...
https://www.ussc.gov/research/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes, a story listing examples of how white people can point guns at cops and live and black people cannot.
Yes, a piece from the "politics" news section that includes citations to peer-reviewed studies.
The Commission's study was most certainly peer-reviewed.
https://www.albany.edu/scj/doc...
Emphasis added.
Sure it does. Read through the commission's report again.
Again, emphasis added.
https://www.albany.edu/scj/doc...
Do you even read, bro?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Facial morphology refers to the various traits and features in a face. For example, the distance between the eyes, or the eye slant, or cheek gaunt or whatever.
'White' people have the broadest range of diversity, in part because aside from the skin color, there's a lot of differences. Certain Asians, like the Han Chinese, have some of the least diversity (google for iphone face recognition matching two Chinese co-workers).
If you pick 20 key features as your unique code, and each of those key features has 20-30 distinct possible values, you can rely on reasonable uniqueness, even when some of those values have inter-relationships. When the diversity goes down, and 10 out of the 20 are not unique, and when the range of values those have is between 3 and 5, well, you'll have a lot more trouble differentiating people.
In fact, a studies shows that among a given ethnic group, actual real life people perform facial recognition on only a few features, but those features are always those traits that show the most variation. When you apply that same algorithm to another ethnicity, it doesn't work so well. You get racist-seeming phrases like, "They all look alike to me," when really the issue is that your specialized detection algorithm was never meant to deal with their differences. ... and every group has this blindness. The one thing that's amusing is that because whites tend to have a large variety, they're the easiest to uniquely identify regardless of your personal/cultural/ethic technique. So, you can say things like "I can tell all you white people apart, you're racist for not being able to identify ME!" and think you're on the moral and ethical high road, when in fact, the situation is different from the other side.
Ah yes, here comes AmiMoJo, expert at everything...so long as there is a social justice angle to the story. If not, suddenly he no longer wants to help, no longer an expert, and does not contribute.
Someday I hope to have reasonable people running slashdot and prevent sockpuppet accounts from getting mod points.
Actually, light skinned people have more variations in facial shape than do other groups. Second is darker skinned people. Orientals have the fewest.
OTOH, in any particular area, the people from outside the area are likely to have more variation, because they have a wider variety of ancestors.
That said, this *is* a bit strange, because the greatest genetic variation is among the population native to Africa. (Note I'm not even including the Australian aborigines. Which are a part of the facial variation of the darker skinned people.) So one would expect the largest variation among the darker skinned people.
Additionally the homogeneity of the orientals is probably due to their long period of civilization. This is a guess, but it's a reasonable one. So there was a longer period of undisturbed gene flow among groups. Even so there are distinct sub-groups, just not as many as among other categories.
A problem with this analysis is that I didn't include the population of the Indian sub-continent, as I couldn't figure out in which group to place them. They have darker skin colors, but have facial features that more closely align with the lighter skinned peoples. This is readily explained by historical analysis, but it does make categorization difficult.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.