A Real Balanced Dataset For Understanding Bias? Factors That Impact Accuracy, Not Numbers of Identities and Images

The issue of disparities in face recognition accuracy across demographic groups has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Various face image datasets have been proposed as 'fair' or 'balanced' to assess the accuracy of face recognition algorithms across demographics. While these datasets often balance the number of identities and images across demographic groups. It is important to note that the number of identities and images in an evaluation dataset are not the driving factors for 1-to-1 face matching accuracy. Moreover, balancing the number of identities and images does not ensure balance in other factors known to impact accuracy, such as head pose, brightness, and image quality. We demonstrate these issues using several recently proposed datasets. To enhance the capacity for less biased evaluations, we propose a bias-aware toolkit that facilitates the creation of cross-demographic evaluation datasets balanced on factors mentioned in this paper.