There are real technical challenges in producing photographs of both light and dark skin, but the focus on light skinned subjects have led to an accumulation of

There are real technical challenges in producing photographs of both light and dark skin, but the focus on light skinned subjects have led to an accumulation of technical solutions. Computerized facial recognition has been progressing for something like 50 years, with each paper building on previous work. I suspect a parallel world where the dominant social group hard dark skin would explore different technical avenues, focus on ways of recognizing faces that lean less on tone, etc. Obviously it's hard to say with what we know now. Humans have difficulty recognizing cross-ethnic faces, however I don't think dark skinned people are worse at recognizing same-ethnic faces than light skinned people. To me that suggests our social history is more to blame than some fundimental quality of skin tone.