Publications

@inproceedings{EUSIPCO_2022,

title = {Assessing Bias in Face Image Quality Assessment},

author = {Žiga Babnik and Vitomir Štruc},

url = {https://lmi.fe.uni-lj.si/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/EUSIPCO_2022___paper.pdf},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-05-16},

urldate = {2022-05-16},

booktitle = {EUSIPCO 2022},

abstract = {Face image quality assessment (FIQA) attempts to improve face recognition (FR) performance  by providing additional information about sample quality. 

Because FIQA methods attempt to estimate the utility of a sample for face recognition, it is reasonable to assume that these methods are heavily influenced by the underlying face recognition system. Although modern face recognition systems are known to perform well, several studies have found that such systems often exhibit problems with demographic bias. It is therefore likely that such problems are also present with FIQA techniques. To investigate the demographic biases associated with FIQA approaches, this paper presents a comprehensive study involving a variety of quality assessment methods (general-purpose image quality assessment, supervised face quality assessment, and unsupervised face quality assessment methods) and three diverse state-of-the-art FR models. 

Our analysis on the Balanced Faces in the Wild (BFW) dataset shows that all techniques considered are affected more by variations in race than sex. While the general-purpose image quality assessment methods appear to be less biased with respect to the two demographic factors considered, the supervised and unsupervised face image quality assessment methods both show strong bias with a tendency to favor white individuals (of either sex). In addition, we found that methods that are less racially biased perform worse overall. This suggests that the observed bias in FIQA methods is to a significant extent related to the underlying face recognition system.},

keywords = {bias, bias analysis, biometrics, face image quality assessment, face recognition, FIQA, image quality assessment},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{GrmEUSIPCO2020,

title = {Analysis of Race and Gender Bias in Deep Age Estimation Model},

author = {Andraž Puc and Vitomir Štruc and Klemen Grm},

url = {https://lmi.fe.uni-lj.si/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/race_and_gender_bias_eusipco-2.pdf},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-09-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of EUSIPCO 2020},

abstract = {Due to advances in deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) there has been significant progress in the field of visual age estimation from face images over recent years. While today's models are able to achieve considerable age estimation accuracy, their behaviour, especially with respect to specific demographic groups is still not well understood. In this paper, we take a deeper look at CNN-based age estimation models and analyze their performance across different race and gender groups. We use two publicly available off-the-shelf age estimation models, i.e., FaceNet and WideResNet, for our study and analyze their performance on the UTKFace and APPA-REAL datasets. We partition face images into sub-groups based on race, gender and combinations of race and gender. We then compare age estimation results and find that there are noticeable differences in performance across demographics. Specifically, our results show that age estimation accuracy is consistently higher for men than for women, while race does not appear to have consistent effects on the tested models across different test datasets.

},

keywords = {age estimation, bias, bias analysis, biometrics, face analysis},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}