[HN Gopher] Every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognit...
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Every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognition, person has
been Black
Author : thunderbong
Score : 85 points
Date : 2023-08-06 21:40 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| 10g1k wrote:
| Light = contours = facial recognition...
| cltby wrote:
| > "We believe this results from factors that include the lack of
| Black faces in the algorithms' training data sets..." the
| researchers wrote in an op-ed for Scientific American.
|
| > The research also demonstrated that Black people are
| overrepresented in databases of mugshots.
|
| The sort of clear-headed thinking that makes the AI bias field as
| respected as it is.
| lozenge wrote:
| It makes sense to me? The algorithm specialises in
| distinguishing between the faces in its training set. It works
| by dimensionality reduction. If there aren't many black faces
| there it can just dedicate a few of its dimensions to
| "distinguishing black face features".
|
| Then if you give it a task that only contains black faces, most
| of the dimensions will go unused.
| cltby wrote:
| Are black faces overrepresented or underrepresented?
| According to AI researchers, we're faced with Schrodinger's
| Mugshot--there's simultaneously too many and too few!
| BoorishBears wrote:
| There's two datasets but your conviction that there's some
| political undertone to this is leaving you unable to
| process basic logic.
| zerocrates wrote:
| The actual quote that the mention in the article refers to:
|
| "Using diverse training sets can help reduce bias in FRT
| performance. Algorithms learn to compare images by training
| with a set of photos. Disproportionate representation of white
| males in training images produces skewed algorithms because
| Black people are overrepresented in mugshot databases and other
| image repositories commonly used by law enforcement.
| Consequently AI is more likely to mark Black faces as criminal,
| leading to the targeting and arresting of innocent Black
| people."
|
| So they're saying that simultaneously the _training_ set has
| too few black faces and the set being _compared_ against has
| too many.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Yeah, that's terrifying. It's the same reasoning as, "Of course
| more Black people are convicted of crimes -- we arrest more of
| them!"
| marsven_422 wrote:
| Maybe they do more crimes
| [deleted]
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Is it plausible that cameras have more trouble with dark skin
| because of reduced contrast of facial features? Or is that
| already studied and discarded, and this is just a training set
| problem?
| jxf wrote:
| That's very plausible. But then that means there is an inherent
| bias against people with darker skin. So the more interesting
| question is: why wasn't that bias anticipated and caught, and
| if it was known, why was it allowed to go to production where
| it affected the lives and liberty of one group of people
| disproportionately?
| vuln wrote:
| Because the people selling the software reported the false
| positive rate a x per y but just accidentally forget to
| report that ALL of the false positives are of one single
| group. I would love to be in a sales meeting with a company
| that develops this type of software and the police that buy
| it.
| jurimasa wrote:
| That's easy: racism.
| ruined wrote:
| it is definitely part of the problem. historically, film was
| designed for optimal rendering of light skin, with little
| consideration given to darker skin. that trend has continued
| with digital sensors and modern image processing. any
| photographer or videographer that regularly images black skin
| is aware of this.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251...
|
| yes, it is also a training set problem. training on real-world
| data will reproduce racial bias, because racial bias exists in
| the world. racism in, racism out.
|
| but the more direct cause of this kind of thing is the racism
| of the police using these tools, the states deploying these
| tools, and the private enterprises making these tools.
| NotSuspicious wrote:
| > All six known reports of false arrests due to facial
| recognition technology were made by Black people.
|
| It's fascinating how sample size differs based on who wants what
| policy to be enacted. What are the false arrest rates due to
| people just looking at a picture and thinking "That's the one"?
| Animats wrote:
| There's work going on to look a little further into the infrared
| to fix this.[1] See the image set "Sample database images in all
| three spectra". High dynamic range images help, a lot.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10320199/
| bandrami wrote:
| We can't even get automatic hand dryers to work for nonwhite
| people so I think usable face recognition is still a ways off
| tasogare wrote:
| Given that hand dryers are ubiquitous in Japan, they're
| certainly working on a large part of nonwhite people.
| henearkr wrote:
| The facial ID standards should move towards adding a 3D scan of
| the face (especially now that biometrics are digitalized and
| stored on chips on ID cards and passports). That would solve this
| kind of problems.
|
| Neuronal networks could then just add that in their training and
| be accurate again, and surveillance systems could use a
| complementary lidar.
| jacknobody wrote:
| In northern Cape York (Australia) I have several friends who
| cannot be successfully photographed because their skin is so dark
| that cameras are unable to resolve their facial features. I don't
| expect facial recognition to be much use on Cape York.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Pretty sure wedding photographers solved this problem a long
| time ago, though I hope none of them let the facial recognition
| vampires in on the mysterious secrets of basic lighting and
| exposure.
| quicklime wrote:
| If they paid as much money for each photo in the training
| data as people do for wedding photos, I'm sure the problem
| would go away.
| Tozen wrote:
| Exactly. This issue is very solvable and people have been
| using various solutions for many years. The hurdle is not
| technology, its other factors.
| Tozen wrote:
| There is such a thing as lighting, using brighter lights, and
| processing of images[1][2][3]. From a technological and
| photography point of view, these types of issues can be
| resolved. Often the issue is the refusal to create a different
| setup for darker subjects, or purposefully injecting
| stereotypes or bias to not find or use obvious solutions.
|
| Furthermore, because people have dark skin, doesn't mean they
| have the exact same bone structure, facial proportions, or
| symmetry.
|
| [1]: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-
| for...
|
| [2]: https://organicheadshots.com/how-to-photograph-people-of-
| col...
|
| [3]: https://calgaryjournal.ca/2021/02/28/time-for-a-new-lens-
| the...
| deepspace wrote:
| > cannot be successfully photographed
|
| I highly, highly doubt that is the case.
|
| Maybe it is hard to take a good photo with a phone in point and
| shoot mode. But any professional photographer and most
| experienced amateurs can absolutely take a good photo of them.
|
| There are only two provisos: they have to use a manually
| adjustable camera, and they have to be able to control the
| lighting (even if only by asking the subjects to move around).
| anaganisk wrote:
| What if the AI is designed to flag them as potential bad
| actors.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Flag the person who cannot be photographed? What are we
| flagging again?
| ithkuil wrote:
| Clearly all such people that cannot be photographed are all
| the same person
| [deleted]
| tedunangst wrote:
| Would be interesting to see when false matches are double checked
| by police and when police simply proceed to the arrest.
| cratermoon wrote:
| As far back as 1985 Brian Winston wrote[1], "It is one such
| expression - color film that more readily photographs Caucasians
| than other human types - that is our concern in this piece."
| Richard Dyer wrote in 1997, "The aesthetic technology of
| photography, as it has been invented, refined, and elaborated,
| and the dominant uses of that technology, as they have become
| fixed and naturalised, assume and privilege the white
| subject."[2].
|
| Key findings in the bias of facial recognition come from a 2018
| paper in _Proceedings of Machine Learning Research_ which found,
| "We evaluate 3 commercial gender classification systems using our
| dataset and show that darker-skinned females are the most
| misclassified group (with error rates of up to 34.7%). The
| maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males is 0.8%. The
| substantial disparities in the accuracy of classifying darker
| females, lighter females, darker males, and lighter males in
| gender classification systems require urgent attention if
| commercial companies are to build genuinely fair, transparent and
| accountable facial analysis algorithms."
|
| 1 "A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the
| Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image"
| <https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025012>
|
| 2 Dyer, Richard. 1997. White : Essays on Race and Culture.
| London: Routledge.
|
| 3 "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in
| Commercial Gender Classification"
| <https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html>
| marsven_422 wrote:
| [dead]
| RugnirViking wrote:
| While I have no doubt of the potential for facial recongition
| systems to have NUMEROUS inbuilt biases, including even IF every
| actor involved in their creation and deployment held no ill
| intent. There have only been six such cases apparently. It seems
| a bit premature for this kind of hedline.
|
| That also being said, this kind of software is just bad in
| general, even outside of the biases thing.
|
| One more thing. A quote from the article: "Detroit's police chief
| said their facial recognition technology, when used alone, fails
| 96% of the time, Insider previously reported." - What?? That's
| insane. Surely those numbers can't be right? the source on that
| he goes into more detail with similar specific numbers. I really
| hope it doesn't only exist to give more ammunition in court, and
| they don't care whether it works at all...
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| AI is the new Polygraph...
|
| Except now it can also be used by academia, employers, and
| more!
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