Microsoft, IBM Facial Analyses Struggle With Race and Gender

Facial recognition is becoming more pervasive in consumer products and law enforcement, backed by increasingly powerful machine-learning technology. But a test of commercial facial-analysis services from IBM and Microsoft raises concerns that the systems scrutinizing our features are significantly less accurate for people with black skin. Researchers tested features of Microsoft's and IBM's face-analysis services that are supposed to identify the gender of people in photos. The companies' algorithms proved near perfect at identifying the gender of men with lighter skin, but frequently erred when analyzing images of women with dark skin. The skewed accuracy appears to be due to underrepresentation of darker skin tones in the training data used to create the face-analysis algorithms.