The paper analyzes the accuracy of publicly available object-recognition systems on a geographically diverse dataset. This dataset contains household items and was designed to have a more representative geographical coverage than commonly used image datasets in object recognition. We find that the systems perform relatively poorly on household items that commonly occur in countries with a low household income. Qualitative analyses suggest the drop in performance is primarily due to appearance differences within an object class (e.g., dish soap) and due to items appearing in a different context (e.g., toothbrushes appearing outside of bathrooms). The results of our study suggest that further work is needed to make object-recognition systems work equally well for people across different countries and income levels.
Several recent papers have identified and analyzed biases in other types of computer-vision systems. For instance, commercial gender classification systems were found to have substantially higher error rates for darker-skinned females than for light-skinned males @cite_25 @cite_1 @cite_34 . A study of Google Image Search revealed exaggeration of stereotypes and systematic underrepresentation of women in search results @cite_5 , and a study of ImageNet revealed correlations between classes and race @cite_26 . Other studies have revealed biases in computer-vision datasets that allow models to recognize from which dataset an image originated @cite_13 @cite_2 . Most related to our study is a prior analysis suggesting that for certain classes, the confidence of image classifiers may vary depending on where the image was collected @cite_11 .
@cite_26 @cite_1 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_34 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_11
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Neural networks achieve the state-of-the-art in image classification tasks. However, they can encode spurious variations or biases that may be present in the training data. For example, training an age predictor on a dataset that is not balanced for gender can lead to gender biased predicitons (e.g. wrongly predicting that males are older if only elderly males are in the training set). We present two distinct contributions: 1) An algorithm that can remove multiple sources of variation from the feature representation of a network. We demonstrate that this algorithm can be used to remove biases from the feature representation, and thereby improve classification accuracies, when training networks on extremely biased datasets. 2) An ancestral origin database of 14,000 images of individuals from East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Europe. We demonstrate on this dataset, for a number of facial attribute classification tasks, that we are able to remove racial biases from the network feature representation. When analysing human activities using data mining or machine learning techniques, it can be useful to infer properties such as the gender or age of the people involved. This paper focuses on the sub-problem of gender recognition, which has been studied extensively in the literature, with two main problems remaining unsolved: how to improve the accuracy on real-world face images, and how to generalise the models to perform well on new datasets. We address these problems by collecting five million weakly labelled face images, and performing three different experiments, investigating: the performance difference between convolutional neural networks (CNNs) of differing depths and a support vector machine approach using local binary pattern features on the same training data, the effect of contextual information on classification accuracy, and the ability of convolutional neural networks and large amounts of training data to generalise to cross-database classification. We report record-breaking results on both the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 98.90 , and the Images of Groups (GROUPS) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.34 for cross-database gender classification. Information environments have the power to affect people's perceptions and behaviors. In this paper, we present the results of studies in which we characterize the gender bias present in image search results for a variety of occupations. We experimentally evaluate the effects of bias in image search results on the images people choose to represent those careers and on people's perceptions of the prevalence of men and women in each occupation. We find evidence for both stereotype exaggeration and systematic underrepresentation of women in search results. We also find that people rate search results higher when they are consistent with stereotypes for a career, and shifting the representation of gender in image search results can shift people's perceptions about real-world distributions. We also discuss tensions between desires for high-quality results and broader societ al goals for equality of representation in this space. We automatically assemble a big dataset to train a face gender classifier.This is formed by 4 million images and over 60,000 features.The resulting system significantly outperforms the previous state of the art without human annotation.This study lends support to the "unreasonable effectiveness of data" conjecture.This study is relevant to computer vision (LBP features, face classification), machine learning (large scale linear classifiers), and big data.This study can serve as a template for other "web scale" learning tasks. The application of learning algorithms to big datasets has been identified for a long time as an effective way to attack important tasks in pattern recognition, but the generation of large annotated datasets has a significant cost. We present a simple and effective method to generate a classifier of face images, by training a linear classification algorithm on a massive dataset entirely assembled and labelled by automated means. In doing so, we perform the largest experiment on face gender recognition so far published, reporting the highest performance yet. Four million images and more than 60,000 features are used to train online classifiers. By using an ensemble of linear classifiers, we achieve an accuracy of 96.86 on the most challenging public database, labelled faces in the wild (LFW), 2.05 higher than the previous best result on the same dataset (Shan, 2012). This result is relevant both for the machine learning community, addressing the role of large datasets, and the computer vision community, providing a way to make high quality face gender classifiers. Furthermore, we propose a general way to generate and exploit massive data without human annotation. Finally, we demonstrate a simple and effective adaptation of the Pegasos that makes it more robust.