
Facial Recognition Is Accurate, If You’re a White Guy - xbryanx
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recognition-race-artificial-intelligence.html
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eberkund
Can someone who is knowledgable on this subject please comment? I am extremely
skeptical of the claim that this problem is as easy to remedy as adding more
pictures of people with darker skin tones to the training dataset. Are
companies really as dumb as not to have tried that after news stories of this
nature have been coming out almost as long as facial recognition has existed?

I am more likely to believe that there is something different about people
whose faces are misidentified. Similarly dark furred dogs are usually not used
in movies because lighter furred dogs photograph better because of how the
light reflects off of them. Perhaps it is as simple as photos of darker
skinned people are harder to identify the contours of the face, maybe that is
why Apple resorted to adding infrared sensors for their Face ID system.
Another possibility is the racial backgrounds of people being misidentified
are more androgynous looking and that the AI needs to incorporate other
attributes like hair style, makeup and clothing as an additional indicator.

