Evaluating Impact of Race in Facial Recognition across Machine Learning and Deep Learning Algorithms

• Main Authors: James Coe, Mustafa Atay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-09-01
• Series: Computers
• Subjects: facial recognition; machine learning; deep learning; dataset; bias; race
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-431X/10/9/113

The research aims to evaluate the impact of race in facial recognition across two types of algorithms. We give a general insight into facial recognition and discuss four problems related to facial recognition. We review our system design, development, and architectures and give an in-depth evaluation plan for each type of algorithm, dataset, and a look into the software and its architecture. We thoroughly explain the results and findings of our experimentation and provide analysis for the machine learning algorithms and deep learning algorithms. Concluding the investigation, we compare the results of two kinds of algorithms and compare their accuracy, metrics, miss rates, and performances to observe which algorithms mitigate racial bias the most. We evaluate racial bias across five machine learning algorithms and three deep learning algorithms using racially imbalanced and balanced datasets. We evaluate and compare the accuracy and miss rates between all tested algorithms and report that SVC is the superior machine learning algorithm and VGG16 is the best deep learning algorithm based on our experimental study. Our findings conclude the algorithm that mitigates the bias the most is VGG16, and all our deep learning algorithms outperformed their machine learning counterparts.