Fairness Under Cover: Evaluating the Impact of Occlusions on Demographic Bias in Facial Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mamede, Rafael M., Neto, Pedro C., Sequeira, Ana F.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916362057678848
author Mamede, Rafael M.
Neto, Pedro C.
Sequeira, Ana F.
author_facet Mamede, Rafael M.
Neto, Pedro C.
Sequeira, Ana F.
contents This study investigates the effects of occlusions on the fairness of face recognition systems, particularly focusing on demographic biases. Using the Racial Faces in the Wild (RFW) dataset and synthetically added realistic occlusions, we evaluate their effect on the performance of face recognition models trained on the BUPT-Balanced and BUPT-GlobalFace datasets. We note increases in the dispersion of FMR, FNMR, and accuracy alongside decreases in fairness according to Equilized Odds, Demographic Parity, STD of Accuracy, and Fairness Discrepancy Rate. Additionally, we utilize a pixel attribution method to understand the importance of occlusions in model predictions, proposing a new metric, Face Occlusion Impact Ratio (FOIR), that quantifies the extent to which occlusions affect model performance across different demographic groups. Our results indicate that occlusions exacerbate existing demographic biases, with models placing higher importance on occlusions in an unequal fashion, particularly affecting African individuals more severely.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_10175
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fairness Under Cover: Evaluating the Impact of Occlusions on Demographic Bias in Facial Recognition
Mamede, Rafael M.
Neto, Pedro C.
Sequeira, Ana F.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
This study investigates the effects of occlusions on the fairness of face recognition systems, particularly focusing on demographic biases. Using the Racial Faces in the Wild (RFW) dataset and synthetically added realistic occlusions, we evaluate their effect on the performance of face recognition models trained on the BUPT-Balanced and BUPT-GlobalFace datasets. We note increases in the dispersion of FMR, FNMR, and accuracy alongside decreases in fairness according to Equilized Odds, Demographic Parity, STD of Accuracy, and Fairness Discrepancy Rate. Additionally, we utilize a pixel attribution method to understand the importance of occlusions in model predictions, proposing a new metric, Face Occlusion Impact Ratio (FOIR), that quantifies the extent to which occlusions affect model performance across different demographic groups. Our results indicate that occlusions exacerbate existing demographic biases, with models placing higher importance on occlusions in an unequal fashion, particularly affecting African individuals more severely.
title Fairness Under Cover: Evaluating the Impact of Occlusions on Demographic Bias in Facial Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10175