These new tools could make AI vision systems less biased

Traditionally, skin-tone bias in computer vision is measured using the Fitzpatrick scale, which measures from light to dark. The scale was originally developed to measure tanning of white skin but has since been adopted widely as a tool to determine ethnicity, says William Thong, an AI ethics researcher at Sony. It is used to measure bias in computer systems by, for example, comparing how accurate AI models are for people with light and dark skin. But describing people's skin with a one-dimensional scale is misleading, says Alice Xiang, the global head of AI ethics at Sony. By classifying people into groups based on this coarse scale, researchers are missing out on biases that affect, for example, Asian people, who are underrepresented in Western AI data sets and can fall into both light-skinned and dark-skinned categories.