How (not) to measure bias in face recognition networks

Abstract

Within the last years Face Recognition (FR) systems have achieved human-like (or better) performance, leading to extensive deployment in large-scale practical settings. Yet, especially for sensible domains such as FR we expect algorithms to work equally well for everyone, regardless of somebody’s age, gender, skin colour and/or origin. In this paper, we investigate a methodology to quantify the amount of bias in a trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model for FR that is not only intuitively appealing, but also has already been used in the literature to argue for certain debiasing methods. It works by measuring the “blindness” of the model towards certain face characteristics in the embeddings of faces based on internal cluster validation measures. We conduct experiments on three openly available FR models to determine their bias regarding race, gender and age, and validate the computed scores by comparing their predictions against the actual drop in face recognition performance for minority cases. Interestingly, we could not link a crisp clustering in the embedding space to a strong bias in recognition rates—it is rather the opposite. We therefore offer arguments for the reasons behind this observation and argue for the need of a less naïve clustering approach to develop a working measure for bias in FR models.