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It is unclear to me why there is "inherited bias" in film/photography technology. Inherited bias implies that the biased film practices of the past have spilled

It is unclear to me why there is "inherited bias" in film/photography technology. Inherited bias implies that the biased film practices of the past have spilled over into the present, causing further racial bias in photography. While it's true that photography in the past was racially biased, it is unclear why modern photography is still racially biased. It may just be genuinely harder to photograph dark skin, after all, the article even says that attempts have been made to fix racial bias in photography. All of this being said, even if photography is not racially biased and the issue is more technological rather than social, the problem should still be fixed. I could also be wrong about all of this, and in reality dark skin is just as easy to photograph as light skin, but the article did not give a modern example of the racially biased "Shirley card"--except for facial recognition technology, but I didn't really consider that photography in the traditional sense. Edit: While modern photography may not be racially biased, Kwindla does make an excellent point that machine learning is replicating the past mistakes of photography.

deytempo 7y ago
Machine learning merely learns patterns that are fed into it. I find it rather amusing that people do not like the result.
- ivanbakel 7y ago
  There's no "merely" about it. ML algorithms are decided on historical data, and it's not surprising that historical data has historical bias. There's little "amusing" about a piece of software that re-enforces prejudices, only now in a way that is supported by a technology culture which prides itself on blind faith in machines. For victims of those prejudices, it presents a real and terrifying future.
zaarn 7y ago
The issue is probably the dynamic range of the sensor or film. Our eyes are incredibly sensitive to brightness and not very sensitive to color, so as a result, we are kinda good at seeing things with different illumination very well and the brain corrects in the color if it's missing it (in fact, most of your vision is black-and-white being colored in by your brain). Cameras on the other hand have one sensor that is only color and not black and white. And with low brightness, noise becomes a huge problem with the electronics. The modern smartphone sensors is incredibly small and even moderate lighting conditions already require some post processing or special capturing methods like HDR to cook up an acceptable image. The issue is most likely fixable by making HDR a standard feature on all cameras and extending the dynamic ranges even further so that darker skin tones are appropriately captured in all lighting conditions.
speedplane 7y ago
> While it's true that photography in the past was racially biased, it is unclear why modern photography is still racially biased. It may just be genuinely harder to photograph dark skin Perhaps if those with dark skin were a majority, far more R&D spending would go into dealing with dark skin tones than say, better zoom lenses or image processing speed. As a practical example, I suspect HDR would have arrived much faster than it did.
- creato 7y ago
  Camera companies have been competing on ISO/gain performance and dynamic range for as long as they've existed. It has little or nothing to do with skin color. There are plenty of motivations for delivering high ISO and good dynamic range beyond capturing skin colors. The idea that it was furniture companies and chocolate vendors that drove this development is absurd, that is probably just Kodak sales pitches backfiring on them 50 years later. Anyone that wanted to take a photo of a white person, let alone any subject, in a slightly darker environment wanted the same thing. Or for an even better way to look at it: if you can photograph fast moving subjects twice as well, you can also photograph subjects twice as dark. Again, this is something everyone that uses a camera wants, independent of race. As for HDR: it is only relatively recently that digital sensors have started outperforming film's dynamic range, which was pretty good for a very long time. Digital camera vendors absolutely had massive financial incentive to fix this deficit. When they started to even come close, that's when the market exploded for movie production, and probably a lot of other commercial applications as well.

deytempo 7y ago

Machine learning merely learns patterns that are fed into it. I find it rather amusing that people do not like the result.

ivanbakel 7y ago
There's no "merely" about it. ML algorithms are decided on historical data, and it's not surprising that historical data has historical bias. There's little "amusing" about a piece of software that re-enforces prejudices, only now in a way that is supported by a technology culture which prides itself on blind faith in machines. For victims of those prejudices, it presents a real and terrifying future.

zaarn 7y ago

The issue is probably the dynamic range of the sensor or film. Our eyes are incredibly sensitive to brightness and not very sensitive to color, so as a result, we are kinda good at seeing things with different illumination very well and the brain corrects in the color if it's missing it (in fact, most of your vision is black-and-white being colored in by your brain). Cameras on the other hand have one sensor that is only color and not black and white. And with low brightness, noise becomes a huge problem with the electronics. The modern smartphone sensors is incredibly small and even moderate lighting conditions already require some post processing or special capturing methods like HDR to cook up an acceptable image. The issue is most likely fixable by making HDR a standard feature on all cameras and extending the dynamic ranges even further so that darker skin tones are appropriately captured in all lighting conditions.

speedplane 7y ago

> While it's true that photography in the past was racially biased, it is unclear why modern photography is still racially biased. It may just be genuinely harder to photograph dark skin Perhaps if those with dark skin were a majority, far more R&D spending would go into dealing with dark skin tones than say, better zoom lenses or image processing speed. As a practical example, I suspect HDR would have arrived much faster than it did.

creato 7y ago
Camera companies have been competing on ISO/gain performance and dynamic range for as long as they've existed. It has little or nothing to do with skin color. There are plenty of motivations for delivering high ISO and good dynamic range beyond capturing skin colors. The idea that it was furniture companies and chocolate vendors that drove this development is absurd, that is probably just Kodak sales pitches backfiring on them 50 years later. Anyone that wanted to take a photo of a white person, let alone any subject, in a slightly darker environment wanted the same thing. Or for an even better way to look at it: if you can photograph fast moving subjects twice as well, you can also photograph subjects twice as dark. Again, this is something everyone that uses a camera wants, independent of race. As for HDR: it is only relatively recently that digital sensors have started outperforming film's dynamic range, which was pretty good for a very long time. Digital camera vendors absolutely had massive financial incentive to fix this deficit. When they started to even come close, that's when the market exploded for movie production, and probably a lot of other commercial applications as well.