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In northern Cape York (Australia) I have several friends who cannot be successfully photographed because their skin is so dark that cameras are unable to resolv

In northern Cape York (Australia) I have several friends who cannot be successfully photographed because their skin is so dark that cameras are unable to resolve their facial features. I don't expect facial recognition to be much use on Cape York.

anaganisk 3y ago
What if the AI is designed to flag them as potential bad actors.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Flag the person who cannot be photographed? What are we flagging again?
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    Clearly all such people that cannot be photographed are all the same person
  - afiori 3y ago
    You need to look at it from the perspective of the system. The system has a database of individuals and is asked "does this photo matches any of the individuals in your database?" If someone whose photo is basically a dark circle with eyes is entered in the system then the next time you ask the system to identify a photo that is basically a dark circle with eyes the system will respond to with the previous match. Like a bloom filter with a bitvector of size 1.
staticautomatic 3y ago
Pretty sure wedding photographers solved this problem a long time ago, though I hope none of them let the facial recognition vampires in on the mysterious secrets of basic lighting and exposure.
- quicklime 3y ago
  If they paid as much money for each photo in the training data as people do for wedding photos, I’m sure the problem would go away.
- Tozen 3y ago
  Exactly. This issue is very solvable and people have been using various solutions for many years. The hurdle is not technology, its other factors.
- taeric 3y ago
  You'd be wrong, of course. The dynamic range of the film was out of their control. And, not shockingly, a lot of lessons film companies learned were lost in the transition to digital. Or rather, they are taking time to spread there. Is annoying, as it is not a conspiracy. It is hard, though, and we see the speed of knowledge spread more now. Or, rather, the relative lack of speed.
  - staticautomatic 3y ago
    What a red herring. Whether or not the photographer controls the dynamic range of the film has nothing to do with whether the range is wide enough or whether the film has a density curve suitable for photographing a black person.
    - taeric 3y ago
      But it has a very real impact on the settings you have to use otherwise to get a good shot? That is, I'm mostly inclined to agree with you. But I also trusted a ton of the other discussion I've seen on this. Which seems to be largely in agreement that film itself had to change to get good pictures of darker skinned people. I got the impression that if you go with black and white, you dodge many of these problems, amusingly. But adding color to the mix makes things very difficult.
- klodolph 3y ago
  Wedding photographers had a hard time with dark-skinned subjects. Color film was fine-tuned for specific matter back in the day, and the two common varieties available were (1) optimized to make light-skinned people look nice, and (2) optimized to make vivid colors. These two approaches were at odds, because anything which made vivid colors would exaggerate skin blemishes. Films in category #2 sometimes worked better with dark-skinned subjects, because these films tended to be more neutral overall, but this was a bit of a crapshoot. Anyone shooting light-skinned subjects had an easier time, because they had films which were purpose-built to make their job easier. Examples of film pairs in category #1/#2: Kodak 160NC / 160VC, Fuji NPS 160 / NPC 160. Maybe Fuji Astia/Provia. Velvia 50 fell solidly in category #2. There are also films that don’t really fit in either category, like Kodak 100UC. Digital cameras contain processing that makes many of the same tradeoffs as film, it’s just that you have a lot more flexibility to make adjustments on the digital side of things. Designing cameras to be “neutral” or “accurate” is not really an option, when it comes to color, due to the sheer complexity of the problem. This is a lot more complicated than just thinking about RGB or XYZ. You get to choose between different inaccurate options, which are each optimized for some specific set of use cases.
Tozen 3y ago
There is such a thing as lighting, type of lighting, using brighter lights, and processing of images[1][2][3]. From a technological and photography point of view, these types of issues can be resolved. Often the issue is the refusal to create a different setup for darker subjects, or purposefully injecting stereotypes or bias to not find or use obvious solutions. Furthermore, because people have dark skin, doesn't mean they have the exact same bone structure, facial proportions, or symmetry. [1]: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for-photographing-darker-skin-tones https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for... [2]: https://organicheadshots.com/how-to-photograph-people-of-color/ https://organicheadshots.com/how-to-photograph-people-of-col... [3]: https://calgaryjournal.ca/2021/02/28/time-for-a-new-lens-the-hidden-racism-behind-photography/ https://calgaryjournal.ca/2021/02/28/time-for-a-new-lens-the...
deepspace 3y ago
> cannot be successfully photographed I highly, highly doubt that is the case. Maybe it is hard to take a good photo with a phone in point and shoot mode. But any professional photographer and most experienced amateurs can absolutely take a good photo of them. There are only two provisos: they have to use a manually adjustable camera, and they have to be able to control the lighting (even if only by asking the subjects to move around).
- beloch 3y ago
  If every facial recognition camera was set up by a professional wedding photographer we'd be golden. But seriously, the minimum requirements for contrast and low-light sensitivity for facial recognition cameras should be raised, and the algorithms should do a better job of specifying confidence. If the algorithm specifies the match is not reliable, maybe police officers won't bust down the wrong guy's door.
britzkopf 3y ago
"Cannot be successfully photographed" Um... What? I may not be a professional photographer, so perhaps there are some color correction nuances I'm not detecting, but I've been seeing pictures of very dark skinned people for DECADES with absolutely nothing particularly jarring or memorable about the quality, or lack thereof, of the image. I recall Google making a huge deal about this at their last event. Like, "finally we can photograph black people because all our equipment isn't racist anymore!", and I didn't understand it then either.
- dannyw 3y ago
  Presumably GP means some sort of facial recognition system, eg at the DMV.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Taking photos of people with darker skin tones isn’t harder, but it is different. And if you don’t know that, those photos will often lose facial features and look flat. There’s lot of history here, some of it debatable, but the general story is… Early film developing used a sample photo of a white brunette as the standard for white balance. Some time later, ad agencies complained to Kodak that photos of chocolates and dark woods weren’t quite right. Kodak made some tweaks. And/or photographers learned to deal with it (both for product photos and people). Digital cameras appear. Similar mistakes/oversights made by industry. Now Google and others claim their cameras can do dark skin.
  - britzkopf 3y ago
    What's the most parsimonious take. 1) at the inception of ubiquitous photography there was a path of equipment development that allowed for equal quality images of any skin tone, but those in charge spitefully decided they didn't want people with dark skin represented. 2) seeing detail in dark objects of any kind is more difficult (something we all know from using our eyes) and no one felt compelled to spend a lot of time wrestling with this very difficult problem when, at the end of the day, everyone has the general sense that, despite never having met him, they have a good idea of what Miles Davis looks like.
J_cst 3y ago
I'll believe that if you're referring to the 70's[1] It should be resolved by now (same video, 2':16") [1] https://youtu.be/d16LNHIEJzs https://youtu.be/d16LNHIEJzs
- taeric 3y ago
  Wonderful video! You'll be shocked to know that digital signal processing was later getting to this. Not for conspiracy reasons, but still later. And then ML was later still. Again, it is all there to be learned, but so many in emerging fields don't know what they don't know. And in images and sensors, many newcomers think things are showing an immutable and fully generalized fact.
akomtu 3y ago
In the survelliance state of the future it will be illegal to be too black. A qr code on your forehead will be sufficient to comply, however.
- jacknobody 3y ago
  Ha!
sangnoir 3y ago
> In northern Cape York (Australia) I have several friends who cannot be successfully photographed because their skin is so dark that cameras are unable to resolve their facial features If recent flagship cellphones can take amazing pictures at night time, then perhaps there's no one who has "skin so dark cameras are unable to resolve their facial features". It's a limitation of the Cape York equipment; they ought to have procured cameras with higher dynamic range and/or adjust exposure. If it's an ongoing problem, then the people in charge haven't bothered to research and/or replace the shitty cameras that literally have one job. They ought to spend a little more money on better camera sensors that are critical to basic service delivery. This is like saying "There are people with names so complicated that the Cape York software can't handle them", just because the names have an apostrophe/diacritic/multiple last names. The problem is with the system, not the people.
- numbsafari 3y ago
  Have you seen photos taken with “recent flagship phones” of his friends?
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > Have you seen photos taken with “recent flagship phones” of his friends? While you were being snarky - this is a great idea for an experiment, if gp can give judgement on pictures of their friends taken by a recent Google Pixel phone. I say pixel because Google boasts its photography AI makes and Pixel hardware people with all skin tones look good.
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    I come from a nearby area to OP (Daintree) and have witnessed the same problem about 8 years ago. The new samsung gear (even the lower-end A52) no longer struggles with this. I can't speak for other brands.
  - totetsu 3y ago
    The only thing that matters in this case is the types of devices used to make the pictures in the training data, and the device being used to make the picture that is analyzed by the algorithm. Advances in computational photography software in “flag ship phones” is not really relevant. Also both sides of this argument are making the mistake of equating photos that are visibly recognizable to a human, with a photo what would provide enough distinct features that an algorithm could make an ID prediction. There could be some bias in when people assembled the data set they chose humanly recognizable images, but it’s not necessary. Also it’s obvious that the kind of features on a pixel level that would be identifiable on a photo of a dark complexion and a fair one would be different. so either you train separate algorithms or you make sure your training data set has enough examples of both.
jdietrich 3y ago
Very cheap small-sensor camera modules sometimes have as little as six bits of dynamic range, which will genuinely cause difficulties in photographing very dark-skinned people. A decent smartphone camera sensor will have at least ten bits of dynamic range and flagship mirrorless cameras are exceeding 14 bits, which approximately matches the dynamic range of the human eye. For a reasonably good, reasonably modern sensor, any problems are somewhere else in the imaging chain. An 8 bit JPEG actually has about 11 bits of dynamic range due to the gamma curve, but excessive compression loss or color space errors might cause clipping. Most displays and commodity printers will have less than 10 bits of dynamic range, so you're going to see some level of dynamic range compression. Any image processing algorithms could cause a detrimental loss of dynamic range if they're weighted towards preserving highlight detail. I have absolutely no doubt that someone from FNQ or the top end might experience real problems with cameras and I have no doubt that those experiences are hurtful and marginalising. Those problems are the result of either poor quality or poor design choices, not any inherent limitation of imaging technology.
- xtracto 3y ago
  Thank you! I had to scroll this far to get some sort of technical discussion. Very interesting information. TIL.

anaganisk 3y ago

What if the AI is designed to flag them as potential bad actors.

ipaddr 3y ago
Flag the person who cannot be photographed? What are we flagging again?
- ithkuil 3y ago
  Clearly all such people that cannot be photographed are all the same person
- afiori 3y ago
  You need to look at it from the perspective of the system. The system has a database of individuals and is asked "does this photo matches any of the individuals in your database?" If someone whose photo is basically a dark circle with eyes is entered in the system then the next time you ask the system to identify a photo that is basically a dark circle with eyes the system will respond to with the previous match. Like a bloom filter with a bitvector of size 1.

staticautomatic 3y ago

Pretty sure wedding photographers solved this problem a long time ago, though I hope none of them let the facial recognition vampires in on the mysterious secrets of basic lighting and exposure.

quicklime 3y ago
If they paid as much money for each photo in the training data as people do for wedding photos, I’m sure the problem would go away.
Tozen 3y ago
Exactly. This issue is very solvable and people have been using various solutions for many years. The hurdle is not technology, its other factors.
taeric 3y ago
You'd be wrong, of course. The dynamic range of the film was out of their control. And, not shockingly, a lot of lessons film companies learned were lost in the transition to digital. Or rather, they are taking time to spread there. Is annoying, as it is not a conspiracy. It is hard, though, and we see the speed of knowledge spread more now. Or, rather, the relative lack of speed.
- staticautomatic 3y ago
  What a red herring. Whether or not the photographer controls the dynamic range of the film has nothing to do with whether the range is wide enough or whether the film has a density curve suitable for photographing a black person.
  - taeric 3y ago
    But it has a very real impact on the settings you have to use otherwise to get a good shot? That is, I'm mostly inclined to agree with you. But I also trusted a ton of the other discussion I've seen on this. Which seems to be largely in agreement that film itself had to change to get good pictures of darker skinned people. I got the impression that if you go with black and white, you dodge many of these problems, amusingly. But adding color to the mix makes things very difficult.
klodolph 3y ago
Wedding photographers had a hard time with dark-skinned subjects. Color film was fine-tuned for specific matter back in the day, and the two common varieties available were (1) optimized to make light-skinned people look nice, and (2) optimized to make vivid colors. These two approaches were at odds, because anything which made vivid colors would exaggerate skin blemishes. Films in category #2 sometimes worked better with dark-skinned subjects, because these films tended to be more neutral overall, but this was a bit of a crapshoot. Anyone shooting light-skinned subjects had an easier time, because they had films which were purpose-built to make their job easier. Examples of film pairs in category #1/#2: Kodak 160NC / 160VC, Fuji NPS 160 / NPC 160. Maybe Fuji Astia/Provia. Velvia 50 fell solidly in category #2. There are also films that don’t really fit in either category, like Kodak 100UC. Digital cameras contain processing that makes many of the same tradeoffs as film, it’s just that you have a lot more flexibility to make adjustments on the digital side of things. Designing cameras to be “neutral” or “accurate” is not really an option, when it comes to color, due to the sheer complexity of the problem. This is a lot more complicated than just thinking about RGB or XYZ. You get to choose between different inaccurate options, which are each optimized for some specific set of use cases.

Tozen 3y ago

There is such a thing as lighting, type of lighting, using brighter lights, and processing of images[1][2][3]. From a technological and photography point of view, these types of issues can be resolved. Often the issue is the refusal to create a different setup for darker subjects, or purposefully injecting stereotypes or bias to not find or use obvious solutions. Furthermore, because people have dark skin, doesn't mean they have the exact same bone structure, facial proportions, or symmetry. [1]: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for-photographing-darker-skin-tones https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for... [2]: https://organicheadshots.com/how-to-photograph-people-of-color/ https://organicheadshots.com/how-to-photograph-people-of-col... [3]: https://calgaryjournal.ca/2021/02/28/time-for-a-new-lens-the-hidden-racism-behind-photography/ https://calgaryjournal.ca/2021/02/28/time-for-a-new-lens-the...

deepspace 3y ago

> cannot be successfully photographed I highly, highly doubt that is the case. Maybe it is hard to take a good photo with a phone in point and shoot mode. But any professional photographer and most experienced amateurs can absolutely take a good photo of them. There are only two provisos: they have to use a manually adjustable camera, and they have to be able to control the lighting (even if only by asking the subjects to move around).

beloch 3y ago
If every facial recognition camera was set up by a professional wedding photographer we'd be golden. But seriously, the minimum requirements for contrast and low-light sensitivity for facial recognition cameras should be raised, and the algorithms should do a better job of specifying confidence. If the algorithm specifies the match is not reliable, maybe police officers won't bust down the wrong guy's door.

britzkopf 3y ago

"Cannot be successfully photographed" Um... What? I may not be a professional photographer, so perhaps there are some color correction nuances I'm not detecting, but I've been seeing pictures of very dark skinned people for DECADES with absolutely nothing particularly jarring or memorable about the quality, or lack thereof, of the image. I recall Google making a huge deal about this at their last event. Like, "finally we can photograph black people because all our equipment isn't racist anymore!", and I didn't understand it then either.

dannyw 3y ago
Presumably GP means some sort of facial recognition system, eg at the DMV.
alistairSH 3y ago
Taking photos of people with darker skin tones isn’t harder, but it is different. And if you don’t know that, those photos will often lose facial features and look flat. There’s lot of history here, some of it debatable, but the general story is… Early film developing used a sample photo of a white brunette as the standard for white balance. Some time later, ad agencies complained to Kodak that photos of chocolates and dark woods weren’t quite right. Kodak made some tweaks. And/or photographers learned to deal with it (both for product photos and people). Digital cameras appear. Similar mistakes/oversights made by industry. Now Google and others claim their cameras can do dark skin.
- britzkopf 3y ago
  What's the most parsimonious take. 1) at the inception of ubiquitous photography there was a path of equipment development that allowed for equal quality images of any skin tone, but those in charge spitefully decided they didn't want people with dark skin represented. 2) seeing detail in dark objects of any kind is more difficult (something we all know from using our eyes) and no one felt compelled to spend a lot of time wrestling with this very difficult problem when, at the end of the day, everyone has the general sense that, despite never having met him, they have a good idea of what Miles Davis looks like.

J_cst 3y ago

I'll believe that if you're referring to the 70's[1] It should be resolved by now (same video, 2':16") [1] https://youtu.be/d16LNHIEJzs https://youtu.be/d16LNHIEJzs

taeric 3y ago
Wonderful video! You'll be shocked to know that digital signal processing was later getting to this. Not for conspiracy reasons, but still later. And then ML was later still. Again, it is all there to be learned, but so many in emerging fields don't know what they don't know. And in images and sensors, many newcomers think things are showing an immutable and fully generalized fact.

akomtu 3y ago

In the survelliance state of the future it will be illegal to be too black. A qr code on your forehead will be sufficient to comply, however.

jacknobody 3y ago
Ha!

sangnoir 3y ago

> In northern Cape York (Australia) I have several friends who cannot be successfully photographed because their skin is so dark that cameras are unable to resolve their facial features If recent flagship cellphones can take amazing pictures at night time, then perhaps there's no one who has "skin so dark cameras are unable to resolve their facial features". It's a limitation of the Cape York equipment; they ought to have procured cameras with higher dynamic range and/or adjust exposure. If it's an ongoing problem, then the people in charge haven't bothered to research and/or replace the shitty cameras that literally have one job. They ought to spend a little more money on better camera sensors that are critical to basic service delivery. This is like saying "There are people with names so complicated that the Cape York software can't handle them", just because the names have an apostrophe/diacritic/multiple last names. The problem is with the system, not the people.

numbsafari 3y ago
Have you seen photos taken with “recent flagship phones” of his friends?
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Have you seen photos taken with “recent flagship phones” of his friends? While you were being snarky - this is a great idea for an experiment, if gp can give judgement on pictures of their friends taken by a recent Google Pixel phone. I say pixel because Google boasts its photography AI makes and Pixel hardware people with all skin tones look good.
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  I come from a nearby area to OP (Daintree) and have witnessed the same problem about 8 years ago. The new samsung gear (even the lower-end A52) no longer struggles with this. I can't speak for other brands.
- totetsu 3y ago
  The only thing that matters in this case is the types of devices used to make the pictures in the training data, and the device being used to make the picture that is analyzed by the algorithm. Advances in computational photography software in “flag ship phones” is not really relevant. Also both sides of this argument are making the mistake of equating photos that are visibly recognizable to a human, with a photo what would provide enough distinct features that an algorithm could make an ID prediction. There could be some bias in when people assembled the data set they chose humanly recognizable images, but it’s not necessary. Also it’s obvious that the kind of features on a pixel level that would be identifiable on a photo of a dark complexion and a fair one would be different. so either you train separate algorithms or you make sure your training data set has enough examples of both.

jdietrich 3y ago

Very cheap small-sensor camera modules sometimes have as little as six bits of dynamic range, which will genuinely cause difficulties in photographing very dark-skinned people. A decent smartphone camera sensor will have at least ten bits of dynamic range and flagship mirrorless cameras are exceeding 14 bits, which approximately matches the dynamic range of the human eye. For a reasonably good, reasonably modern sensor, any problems are somewhere else in the imaging chain. An 8 bit JPEG actually has about 11 bits of dynamic range due to the gamma curve, but excessive compression loss or color space errors might cause clipping. Most displays and commodity printers will have less than 10 bits of dynamic range, so you're going to see some level of dynamic range compression. Any image processing algorithms could cause a detrimental loss of dynamic range if they're weighted towards preserving highlight detail. I have absolutely no doubt that someone from FNQ or the top end might experience real problems with cameras and I have no doubt that those experiences are hurtful and marginalising. Those problems are the result of either poor quality or poor design choices, not any inherent limitation of imaging technology.

xtracto 3y ago
Thank you! I had to scroll this far to get some sort of technical discussion. Very interesting information. TIL.