Deep neural networks have proved hugely successful, achieving human-like performance on a variety of tasks. However, they are also computationally expensive, which has motivated the development of model compression techniques which reduce the resource consumption associated with deep learning models. Nevertheless, recent studies have suggested that model compression can have an adverse effect on algorithmic fairness, amplifying existing biases in machine learning models. With this project we aim to extend those studies to the context of facial expression recognition. To do that, we set up a neural network classifier to perform facial expression recognition and implement several model compression techniques on top of it. We then run experiments on two facial expression datasets, namely the Extended Cohn-Kanade Dataset (CK+DB) and the Real-World Affective Faces Database (RAF-DB), to examine the individual and combined effect that compression techniques have on the model size, accuracy and fairness. Our experimental results show that: (i) Compression and quantisation achieve significant reduction in model size with minimal impact on overall accuracy for both CK+DB and RAF-DB; (ii) in terms of model accuracy, the classifier trained and tested on RAF-DB seems more robust to compression compared to the CK+ DB; (iii) for RAF-DB, the different compression strategies do not seem to increase the gap in predictive performance across the sensitive attributes of gender, race and age which is in contrast with the results on the CK+DB, where compression seems to amplify existing biases for gender. We analyse the results and discuss the potential reasons for our findings.
Fairness has become increasingly pivotal in facial recognition. Without bias mitigation, deploying unfair AI would harm the interest of the underprivileged population. In this paper, we observe that though the higher accuracy that features from the deeper layer of a neural networks generally offer, fairness conditions deteriorate as we extract features from deeper layers. This phenomenon motivates us to extend the concept of multi-exit framework. Unlike existing works mainly focusing on accuracy, our multi-exit framework is fairness-oriented, where the internal classifiers are trained to be mo…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）
Recognition of expressions of emotions and affect from facial images is a well-studied research problem in the fields of affective computing and computer vision with a large number of datasets available containing facial images and corresponding expression labels. However, virtually none of these datasets have been acquired with consideration of fair distribution across the human population. Therefore, in this work, we undertake a systematic investigation of bias and fairness in facial expression recognition by comparing three different approaches, namely a baseline, an attribute-aware and a d…
Vienna University of Technology（维也纳技术大学）；University of Alicante（阿利坎特大学）
As the privacy risks posed by camera surveillance and facial recognition have grown, so has the research into privacy preservation algorithms. Among these, visual privacy preservation algorithms attempt to impart bodily privacy to subjects in visuals by obfuscating privacy-sensitive areas. While disparate performances of facial recognition systems across phenotypes are the subject of much study, its counterpart, privacy preservation, is not commonly analysed from a fairness perspective. In this paper, the fairness of commonly used visual privacy preservation algorithms is investigated through …
Accuracy and Fairness of Facial Recognition Technology in Low-Quality Police Images: An Experiment With Synthetic Faces
Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania（犯罪学系，宾夕法尼亚大学）；Department of Statistics and Data Science, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania（统计与数据科学系，沃顿商学院，宾夕法尼亚大学）；Computer Science, School of Engineering & Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania（计算机科学，工程与应用科学学院，宾夕法尼亚大学）
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）
Optimized Learned Image Compression for Facial Expression Recognition
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität（弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab（机器学习与数据分析实验室）；Translational Digital Health Group（转化数字健康组）；Institute of AI for Health（健康人工智能研究所）；Helmholtz Zentrum München - German Research Center for Environmental Health（亥姆霍兹慕尼黑研究中心 - 德国环境健康研究中心）
Institute of Smart Cities（智慧城市研究所）；Public University of Navarre（纳瓦拉公立大学）
The increasing amount of applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led researchers to study the social impact of these technologies and evaluate their fairness. Unfortunately, current fairness metrics are hard to apply in multi-class multi-demographic classification problems, such as Facial Expression Recognition (FER). We propose a new set of metrics to approach these problems. Of the three metrics proposed, two focus on the representational and stereotypical bias of the dataset, and the third one on the residual bias of the trained model. These metrics combined can potentially be used…
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…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Machine learning models automatically learn discriminative features from the data, and are therefore susceptible to learn strongly-correlated biases, such as using protected attributes like gender and race. Most existing bias mitigation approaches aim to explicitly reduce the model's focus on these protected features. In this work, we propose to mitigate bias by explicitly guiding the model's focus towards task-relevant features using domain knowledge, and we hypothesize that this can indirectly reduce the dependence of the model on spurious correlations it learns from the data. We explore bia…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Facial analysis systems have been deployed by large companies and critiqued by scholars and activists for the past decade. Many existing algorithmic audits examine the performance of these systems on later stage elements of facial analysis systems like facial recognition and age, emotion, or perceived gender prediction; however, a core component to these systems has been vastly understudied from a fairness perspective: face detection, sometimes called face localization. Since face detection is a pre-requisite step in facial analysis systems, the bias we observe in face detection will flow down…
Some Optimizers are More Equal: Understanding the Role of Optimizers in Group Fairness
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University（皇后大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学计算机科学与技术系）
Face recognition is a long standing challenge in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal is to create systems that accurately detect, recognize, verify, and understand human faces. There are significant technical hurdles in making these systems accurate, particularly in unconstrained settings due to confounding factors related to pose, resolution, illumination, occlusion, and viewpoint. However, with recent advances in neural networks, face recognition has achieved unprecedented accuracy, largely built on data-driven deep learning methods. While this is encouraging, a critical aspe…
Yes - This study investigates the impact of commonplace lossy image compression on face recognition algorithms with regard to the racial characteristics of the subject. We adopt a recently proposed racial phenotype-based bias analysis methodology to measure the effect of varying levels of lossy compression across racial phenotype categories. Additionally, we determine the relationship between chroma-subsampling and race-related phenotypes for recognition performance. Prior work investigates the impact of lossy JPEG compression algorithm on contemporary face recognition performance. However, th…
In this paper, we introduce FairFaceGAN, a fairness-aware facial Image-to-Image translation model, mitigating the problem of unwanted translation in protected attributes (e.g., gender, age, race) during facial attributes editing. Unlike existing models, FairFaceGAN learns fair representations with two separate latents - one related to the target attributes to translate, and the other unrelated to them. This strategy enables FairFaceGAN to separate the information about protected attributes and that of target attributes. It also prevents unwanted translation in protected attributes while target…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Binghamton University（宾汉姆顿大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
As Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems become integrated into our daily lives, these systems need to prioritise making fair decisions instead of aiming at higher individual accuracy scores. Ranging from surveillance systems to diagnosing mental and emotional health conditions of individuals, these systems need to balance the accuracy vs fairness trade-off to make decisions that do not unjustly discriminate against specific under-represented demographic groups. Identifying bias as a critical problem in facial analysis systems, different methods have been proposed that aim to mitigate bi…
FG 2025 TrustFAA: the First Workshop on Towards Trustworthy Facial Affect Analysis: Advancing Insights of Fairness, Explainability, and Safety (TrustFAA)
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center（贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院长春光学精密机械与物理研究所）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Fanhan Tech. Inc.（泛瀚科技有限公司）
This paper targets to explore the inter-subject variations eliminated facial expression representation in the compressed video domain. Most of the previous methods process the RGB images of a sequence, while the off-the-shelf and valuable expression-related muscle movement already embedded in the compression format. In the up to two orders of magnitude compressed domain, we can explicitly infer the expression from the residual frames and possible to extract identity factors from the I frame with a pre-trained face recognition network. By enforcing the marginal independent of them, the expressi…
Rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems amplify many concerns in society. These AI algorithms inherit different biases from humans due to mysterious operational flow and because of that it is becoming adverse in usage. As a result, researchers have started to address the issue by investigating deeper in the direction towards Responsible and Explainable AI. Among variety of applications of AI, facial expression recognition might not be the most important one, yet is considered as a valuable part of human-AI interaction. Evolution of facial expression recognition from the featu…
Robust face detection in the wild is one of the ultimate components to support various facial related problems, i.e. unconstrained face recognition, facial periocular recognition, facial landmarking and pose estimation, facial expression recognition, 3D facial model construction, etc. Although the face detection problem has been intensely studied for decades with various commercial applications, it still meets problems in some real-world scenarios due to numerous challenges, e.g. heavy facial occlusions, extremely low resolutions, strong illumination, exceptionally pose variations, image or vi…
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）
Detecting facial forgery images and videos is an increasingly important topic in multimedia forensics. As forgery images and videos are usually compressed into different formats such as JPEG and H264 when circulating on the Internet, existing forgery-detection methods trained on uncompressed data often suffer from significant performance degradation in identifying them. To solve this problem, we propose a novel anti-compression facial forgery detection framework, which learns a compression-insensitive embedding feature space utilizing both original and compressed forgeries. Specifically, our a…
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；John Hopkins University（约翰·霍普金斯大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
How to extract effective expression representations that invariant to the identity-specific attributes is a long-lasting problem for facial expression recognition (FER). Most of the previous methods process the RGB images of a sequence, while we argue that the off-the-shelf and valuable expression-related muscle movement is already embedded in the compression format. In this paper, we target to explore the inter-subject variations eliminated facial expression representation in the compressed video domain. In the up to two orders of magnitude compressed domain, we can explicitly infer the expre…
CAS Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-spatial Information Processing and Application System University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学中国科学院地理空间信息处理与应用系统技术重点实验室）
Surveillance and security scenarios usually require high efficient facial image compression scheme for face recognition and identification. While either traditional general image codecs or special facial image compression schemes only heuristically refine codec separately according to face verification accuracy metric. We propose a Learning based Facial Image Compression (LFIC) framework with a novel Regionally Adaptive Pooling (RAP) module whose parameters can be automatically optimized according to gradient feedback from an integrated hybrid semantic fidelity metric, including a successfully…
Peking University（北京大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
In this paper, we propose a scalable image compression scheme, including the base layer for feature representation and enhancement layer for texture representation. More specifically, the base layer is designed as the deep learning feature for analysis purpose, and it can also be converted to the fine structure with deep feature reconstruction. The enhancement layer, which serves to compress the residuals between the input image and the signals generated from the base layer, aims to faithfully reconstruct the input texture. The proposed scheme can feasibly inherit the advantages of both compre…
TrustSkin: A Fairness Pipeline for Trustworthy Facial Affect Analysis Across Skin Tone
Departamento de Física, Universidad de Tarapacá（物理系，塔拉帕卡大学）；Departamento de Ciencia de la Computación, Facultad de Ingeniería, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（计算机科学系，工程学院，智利天主教大学）
As facial recognition systems are deployed more widely, scholars and activists have studied their biases and harms. Audits are commonly used to accomplish this and compare the algorithmic facial recognition systems' performance against datasets with various metadata labels about the subjects of the images. Seminal works have found discrepancies in performance by gender expression, age, perceived race, skin type, etc. These studies and audits often examine algorithms which fall into two categories: academic models or commercial models. We present a detailed comparison between academic and comme…
In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end feature compression scheme by leveraging the representation and learning capability of deep neural networks, towards intelligent front-end equipped analysis with promising accuracy and efficiency. In particular, the extracted features are compactly coded in an end-to-end manner by optimizing the rate-distortion cost to achieve feature-in-feature representation. In order to further improve the compression performance, we present a latent code level teacher-student enhancement model, which could efficiently transfer the low bit-rate representation int…
Face4FairShifts: A Large Image Benchmark for Fairness and Robust Learning across Visual Domains
School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University（天津大学新媒体与传播学院）；Department of Computer Science, Baylor University（贝勒大学计算机科学系）；Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学电子工程与计算机科学系）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）；School of Computing, Southern Illinois University（南伊利诺伊大学计算机学院）
In the past years, numerous methods have been introduced to reliably detect digital face image manipulations. Lately, the generalizability of these schemes has been questioned in particular with respect to image post-processing. Image compression represents a post-processing which is frequently applied in diverse biometric application scenarios. Severe compression might erase digital traces of face image manipulation and hence hamper a reliable detection thereof. In this work, the effects of image compression on face image manipulation detection are analyzed. In particular, a case study on fac…
We propose a scheme for multi-layer representation of images. The problem is first treated from an information-theoretic viewpoint where we analyze the behavior of different sources of information under a multi-layer data compression framework and compare it with a single-stage (shallow) structure. We then consider the image data as the source of information and link the proposed representation scheme to the problem of multi-layer dictionary learning for visual data. For the current work we focus on the problem of image compression for a special class of images where we report a considerable p…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Biases inherent in both data and algorithms make the fairness of widespread machine learning (ML)-based decision-making systems less than optimal. To improve the trustfulness of such ML decision systems, it is crucial to be aware of the inherent biases in these solutions and to make them more transparent to the public and developers. In this work, we aim at providing a set of explainability tool that analyse the difference in the face recognition models' behaviors when processing different demographic groups. We do that by leveraging higher-order statistical information based on activation map…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；UNSW Canberra（新南威尔士大学堪培拉分校）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）
Forgery facial images and videos have increased the concern of digital security. It leads to the significant development of detecting forgery data recently. However, the data, especially the videos published on the Internet, are usually compressed with lossy compression algorithms such as H.264. The compressed data could significantly degrade the performance of recent detection algorithms. The existing anti-compression algorithms focus on enhancing the performance in detecting heavily compressed data but less consider the compression adaption to the data from various compression levels. We bel…
