Lights and shadows of facial recognition


Lights and shadows of facial recognition


These systems are still wrong in excess with the Asian population or with black men


Look at the phone and activate the screen. That the photo application knows how to recognize the people that appear in the photographs. A social network that reports when someone has uploaded a photo in which we appear.

Video surveillance systems in airports or smart glasses that identify the most wanted criminals. The possibilities of facial recognition are numerous. But there are still issues to be solved, such as data protection, security and fairness in the recognition of all races.

Facial recognition technologies are being used in various fields, from the most domestic to national security. For example, the Government of India is using it to find missing children. In the United Kingdom, some media use it to detect the presence of celebrities at royal weddings.

 Many phones use it to unlock the screen and we can use it without using the fingerprint, a numerical code or a drawing pattern. And, not without some controversy, this technology is also used in a growing number of contexts by law enforcement agencies.

White men
The controversy that often surrounds the use and application of this technology is not new. In fact, some time ago, Google Photos or Flickr labeled the images of black people as "gorillas" or "simios", which generated (evidently) a lot of controversy. Since then, developers of facial recognition systems have worked hard to improve them, but today they still have important failures.

According to a study by Joy Buolamwini, researcher at the MIT Media Lab, on artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms and prejudices, facial recognition is more accurate for white men and has many more faults for people with darker skin, especially women. More concretely,

All facial recognition systems work by analyzing and comparing new images with those already stored in your database. As the number of images grows, the 'software' improves its capabilities to find patterns and identify individuals. The problem, as in other areas of artificial intelligence, is often related to the bias from which they start.

Thus, these applications of facial recognition are 'trained', in most cases, with photographs of white men. In smaller numbers, photographs of women are also provided, with a predominance of whites. Precisely for this reason, the error rates of this MIT study are higher in the case of women, because the database of available faces on which these machines learn is smaller.

 In recent months, leading providers have said they have diversified their data sets to include darker and diverse faces and have made progress in reducing bias. Microsoft claims that the new version of its Face API software tool already only has an error rate for women with darker skin of 1.9% of attempts.


A study by MIT claims that applications misidentified 35% of women with dark skin

IBM, for its part, points out that Watson Visual Recognition is wrong 3.5% of the time. Both IBM and Microsoft acknowledge that their results have not been independently verified and that the error rates in the real world may be different from their image collections.

This problem also happens with Asian people. On many occasions, these systems do not recognize these people well or ensure that they have their eyes closed. Something that, in certain uses, entails that the systems ensure that they are invalid photos.

And there are many Asian countries, especially China, which are using these facial recognition technologies in airports and in video surveillance systems. In Malaysia, for example, it is assured that the success of this technology reaches 80% and that this is helping to reduce the waiting time in boarding operations (going from an average of between eleven and thirteen minutes to a wait of between nine and ten minutes).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Year one post roaming

Image
                               Year one post roaming What do you need to know in order not to overpay if you travel in Europe? Far is left when one stepped on Paris or Berlin and looked for places to connect to the wifi to share with friends the photos of the trip. It has been a year since the technology frontiers in Europe have fallen and now any citizen can use the mobile networks of any country in the Old Continent - including Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway - at no extra cost. Goodbye surprises at the time of arrival of the days of rest for an excess in the bill of the mobile. A measure that, with the value of technology today, has been almost as important as the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which gave the green light to the free movement of people in the Schengen area. Like any rule, it had a small print that it still maintains . On the ...
Read more

Keys to the new government tax that big technology does not like

Image
Keys to the new government tax that big technology does not like It is still unknown how much will be collected but the law will be processed "imminently", although some multinationals have already complained Amazon, Facebook, Google or Twitter have in common that their fundamental business is based on the sale of advertising 'online', in the intermediary activities of digital platforms or in the commercialization of data that is generated with information provided with the user. Therefore, these companies -among others- will pay in Spain the new tax on technological platforms promoted by the Montero cabinet. These are the three assumptions that the finance minister detailed as the bases on which the "imminent" rate for digital services would be based. Although he placed special emphasis on his first appearance before the Finance Committee in Congress where this newly created tax "will not affect SMEs or medium-sized companies", the...
Read more

The EU launches the first European regulation for the flight of drones

Image
The EU launches the first European regulation for the flight of drones The aim is for flights to be "safe" even when the sky is "busiest" | So far, appliances of less than 150 kg are regulated by national authorities The Council of the European Union has approved on Tuesday the first legislation that regulates drone flight in the EU in order to "make it more competitive" and introduce measures to ensure the safety of citizens. "These rules will ensure that flights are safe even when our skies are more and more traveled," said Bulgarian Transport Minister Ivaylo Moskovski, on behalf of the country that represents the Council this semester, after learning of the agreement reached in Luxembourg. It will enter into force this summer once it is published in the Official Journal of the EU. So far, drones under 150 kilos are regulated by national authorities, leaving manufacturers and operators at the expense of different design and safety requirements....
Read more