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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.
For catching criminals then?
White people's faces reflecting more light is problematic.
Darker colors provide less contrast. Less contrast means features are more difficult to make out.
Combine that with the typically horrendous lighting video cams face and you have a situation where recognition fails.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Always knew that machines were bigots.
Have you ever watched some war move where all the actors are relatively unknown and are sporting a buzz cut?
Can't tell one white guy from another, especially if they have similar builds.
And when they later use camo face paint...forget it. All you can rely on is their voices
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's official, I can no longer differentiate between alt-righters and SJWs, both just say "we're the victim and everybody else are raping/genociding/whatever us"
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
This will all even out over time. There are a finite number of facial types by race.
If that's the case, then facial recognition will soon be useless.
lucm, indeed.
It means there's a 50 percent chance you'll kill the AI in a drive-by before it has a chance to ID you.
And wtf is "half white, half hispanic"?? You mean you're 100% white and you speak Spanish?
What's the difference between porn and erotica?
Lighting.
--
BMO
So the government will be less likely to know where I am.
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.
the camera sensor work with light and since a paler skin reflect more light than a darker one the signal to noise ratio increase and more features will be visible and hence the program can do more of it's magic.
Assuming you don't measure the whole scene and use the same exposure you could expose the image for longer (and get something more blurry due to movement) or raise the gain (and gain more noise) but the simple technological fact is that the darker skin will never be as easy to capture as the brighter one. Eventually both may still be good enough but that's the fact.
As for whatever the algorithms somehow are worse for darker people I don't know. But to conclude that from a poorer result on them isn't evidence by itself, especially since there's a totally believable reason and prediction for why this would be the case.
Similarly for women due to makeup their and hair work their appearance may change more plus also be harder to process both naturally and because they blend their skin to a smoother tone using make-up. Camouflage and disguise if you so want.
Put a brown bag on your face and see how discriminating the algorithm become .. Then it won't have a clue!!
I'm glad it's not just me.
Wasn't there an article here on /. about some computer program classing some dark skinned people as gorillas?
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.
It is? News to me, mostly because you're inventing outrage.
Even the Grauniad doesn't say it's racist.
https://www.theguardian.com/sc...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Does this mean it will only identify me half the time?
In the US nobody is half white. You're either white, or whatever else.
You'd have to be like 99% white before they stop calling you whatever else you are.
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
For recognizing people in a crowd, 99% is nearly worthless. That means if you are looking for one terrorist in a train station that services 300,000 a day your false positives are going to outnumber your actual hit 3000:1.
Face recognition doesn't care about hair style. It doesn't with like a human, it measures face geometry like the distance between the eyes.
Camouflage make up works only if you design it to make it hard for the face recognition to see features like the eyes and mouth. Basic war paint has mixed results, especially with cameras that are IR sensitive for night vision.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Then there is no discrimination. Kinect infrared for example does a great job leveling the playground.
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.
They have auto exposure but it's tuned either for general photography or white skin
You mean that they overexpose black skin ? This means that the correct setting would produce darker results, with even less contrast.
Racist? Not really - just that one learns to identify people by looking at people. So Africans generally think Asians and "whites"* look all the same, Asians generally think "whites" and Africans look the same etc.
Nothing strange or racist about that.
Then add the fact that many people have problem identifying others from facial features alone we get a cultural aspect of this "look alike" thing.
It's official, I can no longer differentiate between alt-righters and SJWs, both just say "we're the victim and everybody else are raping/genociding/whatever us"
You're just now learning that the bully always claims to be persecuted, to be suffering, to be the martyr?
It's practically the first thing abusers learn to do, flip reality inside out, and make it so you're the one at fault. They're often quite frenetic about it, especially when you don't buy their bullshit.
Really? I think the terms are best described as "someone I don't agree with" and "someone I don't agree with that have some conservative views" - at least as used by idiots on the Internet.
I have seen several black men make "we all look alike" jokes this year. I guarantee you it's a thing.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Underexposed, not over developed. The sensors are not getting enough light. You would have to increase the amount the light via shutter speed or aperture. But if you tuned it for darker faces, white faces would be washed out and the problem would be reversed.
Another racist (Joy) concluding that the cause of something not considered ideal must be due to racist white men. Pure rubbish.
Actually that is literally the definition of racism.
I just looked it up and it's literally not the definition of racism.
Horseshoe theory. They're two sides of the same racist coin.
The only thing they diverge on is who is the ubermensch and who is the untermensch.
https://usercontent.irccloud-c...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Wait, who is who?
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
They auto exposure algorithms they utilize are actually super simple and optimize for *average* scene intensity to be near the middle of the dynamic range of the camera. This isn't always optimal, but it *is* computationally efficient. The effect is that white people can be overexposed while the rest of the scene is very dark. It's actually very difficult to create an all-times optimal exposure control; they even screw it up at football games!
That's beside the point in this context, because with most facial recognition cameras, you don't control the light. Most of the time, it's going to be daylight, and sometimes street lights or store lights.
That darker objects reflect fewer photons is always going to be the case. That's not racial bias.
Fitness trackers with optical heart readers have a similar problem, where the light does not penetrate as well for darker skin. Some auto-adjust, with the unfortunate side effect of shorter battery life for dark skinned people. And some blast at too high intensity for everyone, and cause burn marks over time for the fairest skinned people, and make their heart beat harder to read.
There's no real solution that fits everyone. People are different, and "one size fits most" is not going to be the optimum solution for either facial recognition, iris scanners, optical pulse monitors, or anything else. Accepting that someone from Iceland is likely going to absorb less photons than someone from South Sudan, and thus optical based equipment will work differently isn't racial injustice.
Someone needs to test whether humans, also, decline in speed or accuracy of facial recognition when dealing with darker shades of skin colour.
I know for certain that I have more trouble reading facial emotion from black people than white people. The naive response is that I live in a city that's 95% white. But I've been able to convince myself that this is the correct explanation. I simply feel like I have less visual data than I would otherwise at the same point in the cognitive process.
Suppose I lived in a troop deployment in Afghanistan, and 90% of the people around me wore camo all the time. Would I actually become better at recognizing camo than civilian gear? But this is, indeed, the converse implication of the naive hypothesis.
There are populations in Brazil that experience the entire range of skin tones on a daily basis. These populations could be tested for recognition rate/accuracy for lighter and darker test cases.
I highly suspect that darker skin tone has a detectable coefficient of identity camouflage, also in human cognition.
In our increasingly Orwellian society, I would be quite happy to have facial recognition technology be less effective on my skin tone (fair).
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
>Darker colors provide less contrast. Less contrast means features are more difficult to make out
That's all there is to this. Let's go home. Seriously.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
If the cameras have their exposure calibrated for a white face (middle gray), but they are shown a black face, they will automatically increase light to make the face look middle gray again, and the face will be overexposed.
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.
Actually it is on point with regard to testing.
Anyhow, what you're saying black faces have less luminance -- well sure. That says nothing about contrast. The idea that there's less detail there to be seen is a result of looking at poorly lit photographs.
The upshot is that if the problem is in the sensor's ability to handle a certain luminance range, by that theory the algorithms should perform better on black faces in very brightly lit conditions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Most algorithms I've seen convert to black and white before further classification. Color is mostly useless and quite expensive (4x as much data) to computers that use geometric features to classify pictures.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
Face recognition doesn't care about hair style. It doesn't with like a human, it measures face geometry like the distance between the eyes.
Yes, and no. While eye distance is a factor, it's not the only factor.
Some of the facial geometry can and sometimes is obscured by hair style, whether it's hair obscuring the slope of the forehead, a lock obscuring the brow ridge, a moustache obscuring the mouth, or a full beard obscuring the entire jaw. For some, the eyes and nose is almost all data you have, while for others there are far more data points.
Rather than:
some of the biases in the real world can seep into artificial intelligence, the computer systems that inform facial recognition
Maybe the issue is lighting? Why does a simple thing such as AI to identify gender from a facial camera have to be an example of latent racism? As if programmers subtly, unconsciously, monkeyed with the algorithm to only work for white faces.
Ken
There's more than enough contrast for a convolutional neural net to work with. You could probably turn it all into 4 bit grayscale before training and still get excellent results.
The explanation isn't what you propose, but unbalanced training sets. Failing any face is equally bad for the training algorithm. Whether its errors are equally divided among all subgroups, or concentrated in one of them, is equally good for the algorithm. Since it has more data on whites, it can profit more from focusing on features characteristic of them.
You can change the training to penalize having a high error rate for subgroups. But this comes with tradeoffs. Better is to get more training data from the difficult subgroups, and train a better algorithm overall. The best way to get an algorithm that makes few errors on blacks (or any other subgroup) may just be to get an algorithm that makes few errors, period.
Horseshoe-theory
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.
The Summary said it was because they were underrepresented in the training data set.
That's what you should first assume when an AI system fails at some particular kind of categorization, so it should hardly be surprising.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
racÂism
ËrÄËOEsizÉ(TM)m
noun
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
"a program to combat racism"
synonyms: racial discrimination, racialism, racial prejudice, xenophobia, chauvinism, bigotry, casteism
"Aborigines are the main victims of racism in Australia"
the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
Weird, I don't see anything in there about thinking that people of other races look the same. Are you sure you got your definitions straight?
The geometry is found by distinguishing between recessed a car with as, which are dark, next to relatively high areas, which are brighter. When the entire face is dark, it's difficult to distinguished shadowed areas, and therefore geometry.
n/t
Darker colors provide less contrast. Less contrast means features are more difficult to make out.
Combine that with the typically horrendous lighting video cams face and you have a situation where recognition fails.
This is precisely why people say diversity in IT is a good idea. Developers primarily develop for themselves, so if you are missing a large selection of the population in your company then there is a blindness there to those people's needs.
Sorry, I misunderstood your previous statement. What you just said makes sense. If I understand what you are saying, attempting to compensate by overexposing will cause the face to look unnatural.
You're right, they shouldn't overexpose as a solution since the point was to identify people from a normal picture. As opposed to using over exposed pictures that are focusing on image recognition. Unless it was an HDR+ picture, it would look really bad. Even an HDR+ picture would have issues unless people wanted portraits of themselves with unnatural skin tones.
I have seen several black men make "we all look alike" jokes this year. I guarantee you it's a thing.
er...?
Basically if you spend your time mostly hanging round with people from one race, people from other races will be kind of similar looking.
On the other hand, it's crass to say "all X look alike" in seriousness because it's not true. All X might look alike to a particular person, but not to many many other people. Do people still say such things in seriousness? I've not heard something like that personally from since the 90s (they say the past is a foreign country... it really is). So if people are still saying it, then yes, people will crack jokes about it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Why are we calling this bias? White males have the most range of unique identifying characteristics:
* Beards
* Moustaches
* More tonal contrast
* Difference in eye and hair colour
Apple's FaceID uses infrared depth perception, where light contrast isn't an issue.
Apologies for the inflammatory title https://www.gizmodo.com.au/201...
They also went to the effort of testing it out on various ethnicities as well, so the AI didn't overly focus on areas that are different for one group but similar in another.
I'm not saying that Face ID is "racist" or anything like that. I'm just happy there's a technical solution that solves this problem.
It's turtles all the way down.
Even computers think that all black people look alike!
Strange you would make this about social justice, and not just an interesting technology problem. TFA doesn't mention racism or anything... It's almost like you are some kind of social justice obsessed warrior who has to bring it into every conversation.
Have to agree with you about the sock puppets though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Wasn't it the opposite scenario? Black men were identified as gorillas?
What is best in life? Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.
It's not the preferred nomenclature!
I'm having trouble with the fact that it's so accurate at identifying men but not women. Gender politics aside, how does this work?
so, even computers have found that blacks and Asians all look the same.
Posting as anon for obvious reasons
This does not seem accurate to me. I'd think that a video camera, having many more bits of resolution than the human eye, would do *better* at seeing color than the human eye.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Sorry, this is from multiple different sources, not one, and different pieces were in different places. The scientific stuff was from places like Science News, and I only read the printed edition, so I don't have links to ANY of it.
And no, orientals isn't a technical term, but I wanted to lump Melanesians, Polynesians, Chinese, Mongols, Korean, Japanese, and various south-east Asians together without including Australian aborigines or their close relatives. This isn't a closely related group, but it's a group that has had a lot of connected gene-flow over the centuries. Among these, I think the most variant are the Polynesians...though that's a guess. Even so, what I said doesn't quite fit for folks at the edges, and applies more closely as you get closer to central China. (Also, e.g., Japanese doesn't include such as the Ainu. I'm not sure where the Tibetans fit. etc.)
Were I to guess the reason, I'd guess that it's because the lighter skinned peoples tended to live in small groups that moved around and were slightly more xenophobic than the orientals, while the Africans tended to stay in one place in small groups that were near close relatives. So neither of the two mixed much (relatively speaking). Also most of the African groups tended to be rather conservative, in the sense of resistant to change, which I attribute to low energy cause by the prevalence of parasites and diseases.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Reread your comment higher up the thread and try following the NPR link; the person ehose work is being reported is very much making this about social justice by saying that it is the fault of the code not being inclusive. If I was in her shoes, I would not consider this a bug but a definite feature given the privacy concerns facial recognition software has caused.
As for the study itself... I would suspect the results are a combination of natural contrast, differing amounts of facial variation between ethnic groups and sexes...and this researcher likely being yet another one that forgets races other than Black & White exist.
I suspect it's not just the contrast issue on the technical side, though. I wouldn't actually be that surprised given the hardwired elements of beauty standards if males of any ethnic group had a greater degree of variation in facial structure compared to the females--meaning that the issue may not be the lack of inclusiveness that the researcher claims, but rather merely that once again White men are the low-hanging fruit as they have more variation and good natural contrast. In fact, since I would be quite surprised if physical anthropology cannot give us full stats for variation rates and ranges in all groups, the degree to which White males might constitute 'easy mode' for facial recognition software should even be quantifiable...
Sorry, but the Native Americans (I'm not sure about the Innuit) belong with the light skinned people. Possibly the first migration, and possibly the last migration, into North America were different, but the vast majority fit with the light skinned people. Skin color is only a simple genetic change, and living in areas with lots of sun and few clothes will quickly cause a darker pigmentation to evolve. (I think it's only a change to one regulatory gene.) The first migration we can't say much about because they seem to have either died out or been totally absorbed. (I haven't heard of any studies of DNA found in their bones. I suspect they haven't been done. Some of the later ones have been done and were fairly clearly related to the northern Asiatic genepool, and I'm pretty sure that means the light skinned people.
That said, some mixing wouldn't be a real surprise. I'm rather sure the Innuit used to go back and forth across the Bering strait all the time. And I rather suspect that the Aleutian islanders are as closely related to the Kuril islanders as to the mainland neighbors...or at least used to be before national boundaries caused travel restrictions. So for the Innuit to be Oriental would be no big surprise. That said, the Innuit used to go on long oceanic hunts, and the Bering strait isn't that wide, but sometimes storms will render it impassible. So I'm sure there was a lot of back and forth.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, the real question is what are you calibrating lighting against? This has been a problem with TV and print media for some time. Ask black actors from the 60's about the problems they had in lighting and filming darker skin. Makeup wasn't designed for black people, and the lighting certainly didn't evolve with people of color in mind. It's simple, white people were exclusive in these domains in this country forever, and as technology evolved around these domains, the built in bias determined zero consideration of anything other than "white" skin. It's not conscious it's institutional and has been, since forever, in this country. I mean the Egyptians, in their hieroglyphs, didn't have this problem with darker skin, go figure. This is an old problem, and it's only obvious now because people of color have equal access to the technology, but unfortunately are not well represented in tech at all levels. Trust me if Steve Jobs was black or a darker skin tone, that iPhone camera and every app would work a lot differently on darker skin. Snapchat might even work for me so I could put some pink ears on my head.
Yes, I am quite certain. Off you go now ...
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You looked it up in the wrong place. Psychology is at play, and all humans are tribal/racist by nature. Don't look in a dictionary to understand how the mind works.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Must be working with one of them "progressive" dictionaries then. As soon as you succeed in reeducating the rest of humanity, we will all have no choice but to agree with you.
It's not racist to point out that white males are the only group that can be objectified and labeled without spawning a twitter lynch mob. It may or may not be accurate, but it's not racist in any way or form.
People like you who associate anything and everything with racism are a social cancer that is going to ultimately desensitize people to actual racism. Feel free to maintain your current trajectory of virtue signalling and self-righteousness but fundamentally you're an impediment to social progress, nothing else.
lucm, indeed.
Your reading comprehension is faulty.
If that were lucm's actual problem it'd be a thousand times better than the reality.
Anyone who ever told you that you're clever, funny or witty was lying or stupid.
lucm, indeed.
As you say it's an interesting technological challenge, and no doubt that's the true focus. It is total happenstance that in the 2nd picture the researcher is featured against a whiteboard with the terms 'Racism', 'Sexism', 'Implicit Bias', 'LGBTQ Prejudice' and dubbed 'an advocate in the new field of “algorithmic accountability.”'
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
You don't understand the definition of the word "definition" in this case. It isn't about dictionaries, but rather memetic structure.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
So the definition isn't the definition? Nice. You sound like one of those "sovereign citizen" idiots who insist that the law isn't the law unless it agrees with their personal definitions.
Let me know when your "black coders" become imaging sensor engineers. You can't just magically code around limits set by the laws of physics.
Why is it that no one using the word "contrast" here seems to understand what the hell that word means? Light colors, dark colors...neither of those alone provide contrast. Contrast is the difference between high and low luminance areas in the same image. If someone has dark skin or light skin then the skin itself doesn't provide much contrast because it's mostly the same color anyway. However, lighter skin DOES provides very strong contrast against darker lips, shadows caused by light not being uniformly projected such as under nostrils or under eyebrows or in the contours of the ears, dark eyebrows and eyelashes and hair, a pair of dark-framed eyeglasses, and so on. Dark skin reflects significantly less light which means that these areas of contrast for light skin have far less contrast against the dark skin. Black beside dark brown will be harder to see than black against peach or olive or pink or yellow.
Face-detection software relies on the simple contrast of several facial features mostly around the eyes to lock on to a face; facial recognition requires vast amounts of information beyond that which are more likely to be too lacking in contrast for dark-skinned faces to make out. It doesn't take very much underexposure in typical indoor shooting conditions for a black face to look mostly like a noisy macroblock-mangled oval with eyes and teeth to facial recognition software. That's not racism, that's just how light works, and given that most pictures to be recognized are likely to be casually shot I see no way to magically code around such problems.
"I mean the Egyptians, in their hieroglyphs, didn't have this problem with darker skin, go figure."
This is fucking late, but...
They had to come up with makeup for Lena Horne, and they called it "light Egyptian." They couldn't call it "makeup for dark skin" or "Lena's Makeup" or some such because it was that "exotic."
I remember the interview she had on 60 Minutes and she chuckled about the absurdity.
--
BMO