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It doesn't care about color. Dark faces reflect less light, making them more challenging to photograph well. If you have less light illuminating a scene, you'll

by ohazi 8y ago

It doesn't care about color. Dark faces reflect less light, making them more challenging to photograph well. If you have less light illuminating a scene, you'll have more noise and less contrast/dynamic range in the image. You need these things to extract features reliably. It's physics, not racial bias.

Cenk 8y ago
Yes, but the result – people actually using door locks with a failure rate of 30% for black women — reflects racial bias. If the locks had the same failure for all people they would definitely not be deemed production ready.
DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
I agree, but I guess there could be unintended bias in the product development process. In particular, when using empirical testing to decide if the system is sufficiently reliable, accidentally using an unhelpful sample of faces. Or even earlier, when selecting the camera and lighting technologies to use.
jfk13 8y ago
Given how hard it is, even with a pretty high-quality camera, to get a photo of our black cat that actually shows her (charming) face effectively, I find this easy to believe.
- Balgair 8y ago
  It's mixed. The issue really is in that the testers aren't 'darker' people, though it's not really their fault either. In color film photography they chose the CYM spectral sensitivities to best represent US white women in heavy make-up under stage lights. It was the 1920/30s afterall. The spectral sensitivities haven't changed much since then as a result (an example of the Lock-In effect in full swing). CCD and CMOS camera dopants are chosen to represent the spectral sensitivities that are similar to film, though physics does come charging in on those. To be honest, yes, it's hard to photograph darker skinned people without sufficient full-spectrum light. Darker skin absorbs more radiation at the solar-peak frequency (~550nm, the light green of most plants), as the melanin is evolved to do. That said, if your film/sensor can see far outside of the solar peak, then you'll pick up darker skinned people better. Old-timey tin-type photographs could see well into the UV (notice how there never are any clouds in pictures taken way back when) and darker skinned people showed up just fine in those old photographs as a result. Fun-Fact: the front facing camera on most mobile-phones does not have and IR filter on it, specifically to help with these issues of darker skin. Next time you are near a handle-less toilet with an IR sensor, you can use the front facing camera to see the little IR LEDs beeping to see if you are there. You can also use the front-facing camera to see security lights and what not, typically those are IR ones too. UV light could also be used, but it is more damaging over time, and thus lower frequency IR light is preferred.
fwip 8y ago
They're not really more challenging, they just have different challenges than photographing white people. Most cameras are set up and calibrated on white people. Also could easily be a result of biased or limited training data.
rongenre 8y ago
Choosing to implement this system clearly reflects racial bias.
crooked-v 8y ago
"It would take more development time, so we didn't do it" is not a sufficient excuse for discriminating against one racial group.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  But we allow that kind of discrimination based on physical characteristics all the time. Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content? Because there’s a ton of “one size fits all” products which don’t fit the ends of the bell curve, and reflect the choice of manufacturer to not serve all body types. I think it’s a poor choice for a door lock, but I’m not sure I a priori think it’s unacceptable for a product to not work for some (~10%) portion of the population — especially when it reflects an engineering reality (skin reflectivity; feature sharpness), and not choice.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    > Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content? Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people before deciding that strict moral and legal standards are necessary to prevent it from happening again.
    - 0815test 8y ago
      > Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people Actually, they have done exactly that. For many centuries before appropriate nutrition became essentially ubiquitous, there was indeed a highly-significant correlation between height and social class - and the lowest class often faced near-slavery conditions in surprisingly recent times, especially outside Western Europe. Of course, you're right that "strict moral and legal standards" are rather lacking on the issue. I'm not sure that we would agree on whether that's a desirable state of affairs.
      - crooked-v 8y ago
        Comparing the unpleasantness of peasant life to literal chattel slavery is disingenuous at best, and you're conflating correlation and causation here, as people in unpleasant lives coincidentally ending up short because of poor nutrition is a far cry from cross-continental kidnapping and selling members of a genetically-short ethnic group on an industrial scale.
landryraccoon 8y ago
Luckily, there’s a technology called a key, which opens a lock, and has no minimum lighting or software requirement for working. If physics is an issue, then doesn’t that mean the technique is fundamentally broken?
tzs 8y ago
> Dark faces reflect less light Or at least less visible light. I wonder how skin pigmentation affects imaging with infrared light?

by ohazi 8y ago

Cenk 8y ago

Yes, but the result – people actually using door locks with a failure rate of 30% for black women — reflects racial bias. If the locks had the same failure for all people they would definitely not be deemed production ready.

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago

I agree, but I guess there could be unintended bias in the product development process. In particular, when using empirical testing to decide if the system is sufficiently reliable, accidentally using an unhelpful sample of faces. Or even earlier, when selecting the camera and lighting technologies to use.

jfk13 8y ago

Given how hard it is, even with a pretty high-quality camera, to get a photo of our black cat that actually shows her (charming) face effectively, I find this easy to believe.

Balgair 8y ago
It's mixed. The issue really is in that the testers aren't 'darker' people, though it's not really their fault either. In color film photography they chose the CYM spectral sensitivities to best represent US white women in heavy make-up under stage lights. It was the 1920/30s afterall. The spectral sensitivities haven't changed much since then as a result (an example of the Lock-In effect in full swing). CCD and CMOS camera dopants are chosen to represent the spectral sensitivities that are similar to film, though physics does come charging in on those. To be honest, yes, it's hard to photograph darker skinned people without sufficient full-spectrum light. Darker skin absorbs more radiation at the solar-peak frequency (~550nm, the light green of most plants), as the melanin is evolved to do. That said, if your film/sensor can see far outside of the solar peak, then you'll pick up darker skinned people better. Old-timey tin-type photographs could see well into the UV (notice how there never are any clouds in pictures taken way back when) and darker skinned people showed up just fine in those old photographs as a result. Fun-Fact: the front facing camera on most mobile-phones does not have and IR filter on it, specifically to help with these issues of darker skin. Next time you are near a handle-less toilet with an IR sensor, you can use the front facing camera to see the little IR LEDs beeping to see if you are there. You can also use the front-facing camera to see security lights and what not, typically those are IR ones too. UV light could also be used, but it is more damaging over time, and thus lower frequency IR light is preferred.

fwip 8y ago

They're not really more challenging, they just have different challenges than photographing white people. Most cameras are set up and calibrated on white people. Also could easily be a result of biased or limited training data.

rongenre 8y ago

Choosing to implement this system clearly reflects racial bias.

crooked-v 8y ago

"It would take more development time, so we didn't do it" is not a sufficient excuse for discriminating against one racial group.

FakeComments 8y ago
But we allow that kind of discrimination based on physical characteristics all the time. Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content? Because there’s a ton of “one size fits all” products which don’t fit the ends of the bell curve, and reflect the choice of manufacturer to not serve all body types. I think it’s a poor choice for a door lock, but I’m not sure I a priori think it’s unacceptable for a product to not work for some (~10%) portion of the population — especially when it reflects an engineering reality (skin reflectivity; feature sharpness), and not choice.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content? Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people before deciding that strict moral and legal standards are necessary to prevent it from happening again.
  - 0815test 8y ago
    > Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people Actually, they have done exactly that. For many centuries before appropriate nutrition became essentially ubiquitous, there was indeed a highly-significant correlation between height and social class - and the lowest class often faced near-slavery conditions in surprisingly recent times, especially outside Western Europe. Of course, you're right that "strict moral and legal standards" are rather lacking on the issue. I'm not sure that we would agree on whether that's a desirable state of affairs.
    - crooked-v 8y ago
      Comparing the unpleasantness of peasant life to literal chattel slavery is disingenuous at best, and you're conflating correlation and causation here, as people in unpleasant lives coincidentally ending up short because of poor nutrition is a far cry from cross-continental kidnapping and selling members of a genetically-short ethnic group on an industrial scale.

landryraccoon 8y ago

Luckily, there’s a technology called a key, which opens a lock, and has no minimum lighting or software requirement for working. If physics is an issue, then doesn’t that mean the technique is fundamentally broken?

tzs 8y ago

> Dark faces reflect less light Or at least less visible light. I wonder how skin pigmentation affects imaging with infrared light?