2022/09/30 by Andrea Atzori, Atzori, Andrea, Gianni Fenu +3
Computer Science · #Biometric Identification and Security #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Face and Expression Recognition #Face recognition and analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.15550
openalex publication_date 2022/09/30 · openalex created_date 2022/10/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Face biometrics are playing a key role in making modern smart city applications more secure and usable. Commonly, the recognition threshold of a face recognition system is adjusted based on the degree of security for the considered use case. The likelihood of a match can be for instance decreased by setting a high threshold in case of a payment transaction verification. Prior work in face recognition has unfortunately showed that error rates are usually higher for certain demographic groups. These disparities have hence brought into question the fairness of systems empowered with face biometrics. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which disparities among demographic groups change under different security levels. Our analysis includes ten face recognition models, three security thresholds, and six demographic groups based on gender and ethnicity. Experiments show that the higher the security of the system is, the higher the disparities in usability among demographic groups are. Compelling unfairness issues hence exist and urge countermeasures in real-world high-stakes environments requiring severe security levels.