Person Perception Biases Exposed: Revisiting the First Impressions Dataset

Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Agata Lapedriza, Cristina Palmero, Xavier Baro, Sergio Escalera; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2021, pp. 13-21

This work revisits the ChaLearn First Impressions database, annotated for personality perception using pairwise comparisons via crowdsourcing. We analyse for the first time the original pairwise annotations, and reveal existing person perception biases associated to perceived attributes like gender, ethnicity, age and face attractiveness. We show how person perception bias can influence data labelling of a subjective task, which has received little attention from the computer vision and machine learning communities by now. We further show that the mechanism used to convert pairwise annotations to continuous values may magnify the biases if no special treatment is considered. The findings of this study are relevant for the computer vision community that is still creating new datasets on subjective tasks, and using them for practical applications, ignoring these perceptual biases.