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Facial-Recognition Systems Struggle to ID Dark-Skinned Women

Facial-recognition systems only misidentified lighter-skinned men 1 percent of the time; that shot up to 35 percent for darker-skinned women, MIT Media Labs finds.

February 11, 2018
MIT Facial Recognition Paper

Facial recognition can be an incredibly useful tool that helps you accomplish a number of tasks a lot quicker. A great facial-recognition setup on your smartphone can help you authenticate into your device without having to type in a PIN or press your thumb on a fingerprint scanner. It can remind you to tag friends' faces in photos on social media, or—if the service is especially clever—tag their faces on your behalf. You might even be able to search for a friend's name on your online photo archive and find all the pictures with them in it.

However, facial recognition is only as useful as it is accurate, and a new report from the MIT Media Lab indicates that today's artificial intelligence systems are still struggling to identify faces of different genders and colors. As the New York Times reports, the study—authored by Joy Buolamwini and Microsoft's Timnit Gebru—shows that it's a lot easier for systems to identify light-skinned males than darker-skinned women. It's incredibly difficult to get it wrong for the former, and surprisingly error-filled for the latter.

The study relied on a data set of 1,270 faces, which was sourced from three African and three Nordic countries. "The specific African and European countries were selected based on their ranking for gender parity as assessed by the Inter Parliamentary Union. Of all the countries in the world, Rwanda has the highest proportion of women in parliament," the report finds.

"Nordic countries were also well represented in the top 10 nations. Given the gender parity and prevalence of lighter skin in the region, Iceland, Finland, and Sweden were chosen. To balance for darker skin, the next two highest-ranking African nations, Senegal and South Africa, were also added."

Each face was then assigned a rating for skin type based on the six-point Fitzpatrick rating system, which dermatologists use as "the gold standard" for classifying different shades of skin, the paper notes. The researchers then tested three different companies' facial-recognition technologies to see how well they identified gender in each face photograph: Microsoft, IBM, and Megvii.

The results? The systems had an easy time with lighter-skinned men, only misidentifying gender in up to 1 percent of all photos. The systems were slightly less accurate for lighter-skinned women, offering up an incorrect assessment in up to 7 percent of photos. The systems struggled with darker-skinned men more, with errors in up to 12 percent of all photos, and had a terrible time with darker-skinned women, misidentifying gender in up to 35 percent of all photos.

"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," the paper reads.

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David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month gig turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he later rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors. For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).

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