Exploring Racial Bias Within Face Recognition via Per-Subject Adversarially-Enabled Data Augmentation

Seyma Yucer, Samet Akcay, Noura Al-Moubayed, Toby P. Breckon; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2020, pp. 18-19

Abstract


Whilst face recognition applications are becoming increasingly prevalent within our daily lives, leading approaches in the field still suffer from performance bias to the detriment of some racial profiles within society. In this study, we propose a novel adversarial derived data augmentation methodology that aims to enable dataset balance at a per-subject level via the use of image-to-image transformation for the transfer of sensitive racial characteristic facial features. Our aim is to automatically construct a synthesised dataset by transforming facial images across varying racial domains, while still preserving identity-related features, such that racially dependant features subsequently become irrelevant within the determination of subject identity. We construct our experiments on three significant face recognition variants: Softmax, CosFace and ArcFace loss over a common convolutional neural network backbone. In a side-by-side comparison, we show the positive impact our proposed technique can have on the recognition performance for (racial) minority groups within an originally unbalanced training dataset by reducing the per-race variance in performance.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Yucer_2020_CVPR_Workshops,
author = {Yucer, Seyma and Akcay, Samet and Al-Moubayed, Noura and Breckon, Toby P.},
title = {Exploring Racial Bias Within Face Recognition via Per-Subject Adversarially-Enabled Data Augmentation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops},
month = {June},
year = {2020}
}