Reconsidering CO2 Emissions From Computer Vision

Andre Fu, Mahdi S. Hosseini, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2021, pp. 2311-2317

Climate change is a pressing issue that is currently affecting and will affect every part of our lives. It's becoming incredibly vital we, as a society, address the climate crisis as a universal effort, including those in the Computer Vision (CV) community. In this work, we analyze the total cost of CO2 emissions by breaking it into (1) the architecture creation cost and (2) the life-time evaluation cost. We show that over time, these costs are non-negligible and are having a direct impact on our future. Importantly, we conduct an ethical analysis of how the CV-community is unintentionally overlooking its own ethical AI principles by emitting this level of CO2. To address these concerns, we propose adding "enforcement" as a pillar of ethical AI and provide some recommendations for how architecture designers and broader CV community can curb the climate crisis.