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.

Comments

The laws of physics are discriminatory

[Anonymous Coward]

White people's faces reflecting more light is problematic.

Re: Facial recognition

[sycodon]

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.