No abstract

We present a comprehensive analysis of how and why face recognition accuracy differs between men and women. We show that accuracy is lower for women due to the combination of (1) the impostor distribution for women having a skew toward higher similarity scores, and (2) the genuine distribution for women having a skew toward lower similarity scores. We show that this phenomenon of the impostor and genuine distributions for women shifting closer towards each other is general across datasets of African-American, Caucasian, and Asian faces. We show that the distribution of facial expressions may differ between male/female, but that the accuracy difference persists for image subsets rated confidently as neutral expression. The accuracy difference also persists for image subsets rated as close to zero pitch angle. Even when removing images with forehead partially occluded by hair/hat, the same impostor/genuine accuracy difference persists. We show that the female genuine distribution improves when only female images without facial cosmetics are used, but that the female impostor distribution also degrades at the same time. Lastly, we show that the accuracy difference persists even if a state-of-the-art deep learning method is trained from scratch using training data explicitly balanced between male and female images and subjects.

Even though deep learning methods have greatly increased the overall accuracy of face recognition, an old problem still persists: accuracy is higher for men than for women. Previous researchers have speculated that the difference could be due to cosmetics, head pose, or hair covering the face. It is also often speculated that the lower accuracy for women is caused by women being underrepresented in the training data. This work aims to investigate if gender imbalance in the training data is actually the cause of lower accuracy for females. Using a state-of-the-art deep CNN, three different loss functions, and two training datasets, we train each on seven subsets with different male/female ratios, totaling forty two trainings. The trained face matchers are then tested on three different testing datasets. Results show that gender-balancing the dataset has an overall positive effect, with higher accuracy for most of the combinations of loss functions and datasets when a balanced subset is used. However, for the best combination of loss function and dataset, the original training dataset shows better accuracy on 3 out of 4 times. We observe that test accuracy for males is higher when the training data is all male. However, test accuracy for females is not maximized when the training data is all female. For a number of combinations of loss function and test dataset, accuracy for females is higher when only 75% of the training data is female than when 100% of the training data is female. This suggests that lower accuracy for females is not a simple result of the fraction of female training data. By clustering face features, we show that in general, male faces are closer to other male faces than female faces, and female faces are closer to other female faces than male faces.

No abstract

No abstract