Toward Fairness in Face Matching Algorithms

Automated face matching algorithms are used in a wide variety of societal applications ranging from access authentication, to criminal identification, to application customization. Hence, it is important for such algorithms to be equitable in their performance for different demographic groups. If the algorithms work well only for certain racial or gender identities, they would adversely affect others. Recent efforts in algorithmic fairness literature (typically not focused on multimedia or computer vision tasks such as face matching) have argued for designing algorithms and architectures to tackle such bias via trade-offs between accuracy and fairness. Here, we show that adopting an adversarial deep learning-based approach allows for the model to maintain the accuracy at face matching while also reducing demographic disparities compared to a baseline (non-adversarial deep learning) approach at face matching. The results motivate and pave way for more accurate and fair face matching algorithms.