Exploring Causes of Demographic Variations In Face Recognition Accuracy

Abstract: In recent years, media reports have called out bias and racism in face recognition technology. We review experimental results exploring several speculated causes for asymmetric cross-demographic performance. We consider accuracy differences as represented by variations in non-mated (impostor) and / or mated (genuine) distributions for 1-to-1 face matching. Possible causes explored include differences in skin tone, face size and shape, imbalance in number of identities and images in the training data, and amount of face visible in the test data ("face pixels"). We find that demographic differences in face pixel information of the test images appear to most directly impact the resultant differences in face recognition accuracy.