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Comment on Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers

conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Facial recognition works better on white people because, mathematically, they provide more information in real world camera use cases.

Darker skin reflects less light and dark contrast is much more difficult for cameras to capture unless you have significantly higher end equipment.

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milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
No, your honour, I did not wear blackface to trivialise the suffering of people who came from Africa. I wore blackface to hide from Facebook Glasses.

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NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.

For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and… yeah.

I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren’t able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.

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- fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You’re not wrong. Research into models trained on racially balanced datasets has shown better recognition performance among with reduced biases. This was in limited and GAN generated faces so it still needs to be recreated with real-world data but it shows promise that balancing training data should reduce bias.
  
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  - NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah but this is (basically) reddit and clearly it isn’t racism and is just a problem of multi megapixel cameras not being sufficient to properly handle the needs of phrenology.
    
    There is definitely some truth to needing to tweak how feature points (?) are computed and the like. But yeah, training data goes a long way and this is why there was a really big push to get better training data sets out there… until we all realized those would predominantly be used by corporations and that people don’t really want to be the next Lenna because they let some kid take a picture of them for extra credit during an undergrad course.
    
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    fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You okay?
    
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- conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  For any scenario short of studio lighting, there is objectively much less information.
  
  You’re also dramatically underestimating how truly fucking awful phone camera sensors actually are without the crazy amount of processing phones do to make them functional.
  
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  - NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    No. I have worked with phone camera sensors quite a bit (see above regarding evaluating facial recognition software…).
    
    Yes, the computation is a Thing. A bigger Thing is just accessing the databases to match the faces. That is why this gets offloaded to a server farm somewhere.
    
    But the actual computer vision and source image? You can get more than enough contours and features from dark skin no matter how much you desperately try to talk about how “difficult” black skin is without dropping an n-word. You just have to put a bit of effort in to actually check for those rather than do what a bunch of white grad students did twenty years ago (or just do what a bunch of multicultural grad students did five or six years ago but…).
    
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    conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It’s not racist to understand physics.
    
    It’s exactly the same reason phone cameras do terrible in low light unless they do obscenely long exposures (which can’t resolve detail in anything moving). The information is not captured at sufficient resolution.
    
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