Balancing Biases and Preserving Privacy on Balanced Faces in the Wild

There are demographic biases in the SOTA CNN used for FR. Our BFW dataset serves as a proxy to measure bias across ethnicity and gender subgroups, allowing us to characterize FR performances per subgroup. We show performances are non-optimal when a single score threshold is used to determine whether sample pairs are genuine or imposter. Furthermore, actual performance ratings vary greatly from the reported across subgroups. Thus, claims of specific error rates only hold true for populations matching that of the validation data. We mitigate the imbalanced performances using a novel domain adaptation learning scheme on the facial encodings extracted using SOTA deep nets. Not only does this technique balance performance, but it also boosts the overall performance. A benefit of the proposed is to preserve identity information in facial features while removing demographic knowledge in the lower dimensional features. The removal of demographic knowledge prevents future potential biases from being injected into decision-making. Additionally, privacy concerns are satisfied by this removal. We explore why this works qualitatively with hard samples. We also show quantitatively that subgroup classifiers can no longer learn from the encodings mapped by the proposed.

Recognizing Families In the Wild : The 4th Edition

Recognizing Families In the Wild (RFIW): an annual large-scale, multi-track automatic kinship recognition evaluation that supports various visual kin-based problems on scales much higher than ever before. Organized in conjunction with the 15th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) as a Challenge, RFIW provides a platform for publishing original work and the gathering of experts for a discussion of the next steps. This paper summarizes the supported tasks (i.e., kinship verification, tri-subject verification, and search & retrieval of missing children) in the evaluation protocols, which include the practical motivation, technical background, data splits, metrics, and benchmark results. Furthermore, top submissions (i.e., leader-board stats) are listed and reviewed as a high-level analysis on the state of the problem. In the end, the purpose of this paper is to describe the 2020 RFIW challenge, end-to-end, along with forecasts in promising future directions.

Face Recognition: Too Bias, or Not Too Bias?

We reveal critical insights into problems of bias in state-of-the-art facial recognition (FR) systems using a novel Balanced Faces In the Wild (BFW) dataset: data balanced for gender and ethnic groups. We show variations in the optimal scoring threshold for face-pairs across different subgroups. Thus, the conventional approach of learning a global threshold for all pairs resulting in performance gaps among subgroups. By learning subgroup-specific thresholds, we not only mitigate problems in performance gaps but also show a notable boost in the overall performance. Furthermore, we do a human evaluation to measure the bias in humans, which supports the hypothesis that such a bias exists in human perception. For the BFW database, source code, and more, visit github.com/visionjo/facerec-bias-bfw.