Systems incorporating biometric technologies have become ubiquitous in personal, commercial, and governmental identity management applications. Both cooperative (e.g. access control) and non-cooperative (e.g. surveillance and forensics) systems have benefited from biometrics. Such systems rely on the uniqueness of certain biological or behavioural characteristics of human beings, which enable for individuals to be reliably recognised using automated algorithms.
Recently, however, there has been a wave of public and academic concerns regarding the existence of systemic bias in automated decision systems (including biometrics). Most prominently, face recognition algorithms have often been labelled as "racist" or "biased" by the media, non-governmental organisations, and researchers alike.
The main contributions of this article are: (1) an overview of the topic of algorithmic bias in the context of biometrics, (2) a comprehensive survey of the existing literature on biometric bias estimation and mitigation, (3) a discussion of the pertinent technical and social matters, and (4) an outline of the remaining challenges and future work items, both from technological and social points of view.
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Max Planck Institute for Human Development（马克斯·普朗克人类发展研究所）
The most popular face recognition benchmarks assume a distribution of subjects without much attention to their demographic attributes. In this work, we perform a comprehensive discrimination-aware experimentation of deep learning-based face recognition. The main aim of this study is focused on a better understanding of the feature space generated by deep models, and the performance achieved over different demographic groups. We also propose a general formulation of algorithmic discrimination with application to face biometrics. The experiments are conducted over the new DiveFace database compo…
Recently, different researchers have found that the gallery composition of a face database can induce performance differentials to facial identification systems in which a probe image is compared against up to all stored reference images to reach a biometric decision. This negative effect is referred to as "watchlist imbalance effect". In this work, we present a method to theoretically estimate said effect for a biometric identification system given its verification performance across demographic groups and the composition of the used gallery. Further, we report results for identification expe…
Hochschule Darmstadt（达姆施塔特应用技术大学）；University of Salzburg（萨尔茨堡大学）
Recently, concerns regarding potential biases in the underlying algorithms of many automated systems (including biometrics) have been raised. In this context, a biased algorithm produces statistically different outcomes for different groups of individuals based on certain (often protected by anti-discrimination legislation) attributes such as sex and age. While several preliminary studies investigating this matter for facial recognition algorithms do exist, said topic has not yet been addressed for vascular biometric characteristics. Accordingly, in this paper, several popular types of recogni…
KU Leuven（天主教鲁汶大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；USI Lugano（卢加诺大学）；Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis（印第安纳大学-普渡大学印第安纳波利斯联合分校）；Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Twitter（推特）
Face recognition is a widely accepted biometric verification tool, as the face contains a lot of information about the identity of a person. In this study, a 2-step neural-based pipeline is presented for matching 3D facial shape to multiple DNA-related properties (sex, age, BMI and genomic background). The first step consists of a triplet loss-based metric learner that compresses facial shape into a lower dimensional embedding while preserving information about the property of interest. Most studies in the field of metric learning have only focused on 2D Euclidean data. In this work, geometric…
Face biometrics are playing a key role in making modern smart city applications more secure and usable. Commonly, the recognition threshold of a face recognition system is adjusted based on the degree of security for the considered use case. The likelihood of a match can be for instance decreased by setting a high threshold in case of a payment transaction verification. Prior work in face recognition has unfortunately showed that error rates are usually higher for certain demographic groups. These disparities have hence brought into question the fairness of systems empowered with face biometri…
Over the past two decades, biometric recognition has exploded into a plethora of different applications around the globe. This proliferation can be attributed to the high levels of authentication accuracy and user convenience that biometric recognition systems afford end-users. However, in-spite of the success of biometric recognition systems, there are a number of outstanding problems and concerns pertaining to the various sub-modules of biometric recognition systems that create an element of mistrust in their use - both by the scientific community and also the public at large. Some of these …
Hochschule Ansbach（安斯巴赫应用技术大学）；Hochschule Darmstadt（达姆施塔特应用技术大学）；EURECOM（欧洲通信学院）；Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所）
Since early 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on many aspects of daily life. A range of different measures have been implemented worldwide to reduce the rate of new infections and to manage the pressure on national health services. A primary strategy has been to reduce gatherings and the potential for transmission through the prioritisation of remote working and education. Enhanced hand hygiene and the use of facial masks have decreased the spread of pathogens when gatherings are unavoidable. These particular measures present challenges for reliable biometric recognition…
This study demonstrates how facial biometrics, acquired using multi-spectral sensors, such as RGB, depth, and infrared, assist the data accumulation in the process of authorizing users of automated and semi-automated access systems. This data serves the purposes of person authentication, as well as facial temperature estimation. We utilize depth data taken using an inexpensive RGB-D sensor to find the head pose of a subject. This allows the selection of video frames containing a frontal-view head pose for face recognition and face temperature reading. Usage of the frontal-view frames improves …
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Dayalbagh Educational Institute（达亚尔巴格教育学院）；Saran Ashram Hospital（萨兰阿什拉姆医院）
With a number of emerging applications requiring biometric recognition of children (e.g., tracking child vaccination schedules, identifying missing children and preventing newborn baby swaps in hospitals), investigating the temporal stability of biometric recognition accuracy for children is important. The persistence of recognition accuracy of three of the most commonly used biometric traits (fingerprints, face and iris) has been investigated for adults. However, persistence of biometric recognition accuracy has not been studied systematically for children in the age group of 0-4 years. Given…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Deeply-learned face representations enable the success of current face recognition systems. Despite the ability of these representations to encode the identity of an individual, recent works have shown that more information is stored within, such as demographics, image characteristics, and social traits. This threatens the user's privacy, since for many applications these templates are expected to be solely used for recognition purposes. Knowing the encoded information in face templates helps to develop bias-mitigating and privacy-preserving face recognition technologies. This work aims to sup…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Current face recognition systems achieve high progress on several benchmark tests. Despite this progress, recent works showed that these systems are strongly biased against demographic sub-groups. Consequently, an easily integrable solution is needed to reduce the discriminatory effect of these biased systems. Previous work mainly focused on learning less biased face representations, which comes at the cost of a strongly degraded overall recognition performance. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised fair score normalization approach that is specifically designed to reduce the effect of…
On the Illusion of Gender Bias in Face Recognition: Explaining the Fairness Issue Through Non-demographic Attributes
Paderborn University（帕德博恩大学）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特技术大学）；University of Notre Dame（诺特丹大学）；Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz（美因茨约翰· Gutenberg大学）
Technological advancements allow biometric applications to be more omnipresent than in any other time before. This paper argues that in the current EU data protection regulation, classification applications using biometric data receive less protection compared to biometric recognition. We analyse preconditions in the regulatory language and explore how this has the potential to be the source of unique privacy risks for processing operations classifying individuals based on soft traits like emotions. This can have high impact on personal freedoms and human rights and therefore, should be subjec…
Sum of Group Error Differences: A Critical Examination of Bias Evaluation in Biometric Verification and a Dual-Metric Measure
Information Technologies Institute, CERTH（信息技术研究所（CERTH））；Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；IDnow, Research CoE（IDnow研究中心）；Research Institute CODE, Bundeswehr University Munich（慕尼黑联邦国防军大学CODE研究所）
Ethnicity is a key demographic attribute of human beings and it plays a vital role in automatic facial recognition and have extensive real world applications such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI); demographic based classification; biometric based recognition; security and defense to name a few. In this paper we present a novel approach for extracting ethnicity from the facial images. The proposed method makes use of a pre trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract the features and then Support Vector Machine (SVM) with linear kernel is used as a classifier. This technique uses tr…
Hunan First Normal University（湖南第一师范学院）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Finger vein recognition is an emerging biometric recognition technology. Different from the other biometric features on the body surface, the venous vascular tissue of the fingers is buried deep inside the skin. Due to this advantage, finger vein recognition is highly stable and private. They are almost impossible to be stolen and difficult to interfere with by external conditions. Unlike the finger vein recognition methods based on traditional machine learning, the artificial neural network technique, especially deep learning, it without relying on feature engineering and have superior perfor…
Synthetic Data for Face Recognition: Current State and Future Prospects
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学电气工程学院）；School of Engineering, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学计算机科学系）
Human resource management technologies have moved from biometric surveillance to emotional artificial intelligence (AI) that monitor employees' engagement and productivity, analyze video interviews and CVs of job applicants. The rise of the US$20 billion emotional AI industry will transform the future workplace. Yet, besides no international consensus on the principles or standards for such technologies, there is a lack of cross-cultural research on future job seekers' attitude toward such use of AI technologies. This study collects a cross-sectional dataset of 1,015 survey responses of intern…
