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Comment by BearsAreCool | Hacker News Reader

Facial recognition along with just cameras in general have historically struggled with the faces of non-caucasian individuals. This typically results from biases in training sets and in many cases cameras simply creating images with far more contrast for lighter skin tones.

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> faces of non-caucasian individuals

The Chinese government, operating the biggest surveillance state on the planet, have had no trouble with the faces of non-caucasian individuals, historically or otherwise. Their facial recognition systems are highly adept at identifying asian faces. They also supply half the world.

According to IHS Markit, China accounted for nearly half of the global facial recognition business in 2018.

https://www.ft.com/content/6f1a8f48-1813-11ea-9ee4-11f260415...

The real issue here is not Caucasian skin tones vs everyone else but instead light skin tones vs dark(er) skin tones. So Chinese government won't have an issue with current facial recognition tech.

Relatedly, photography itself developed an early bias against black people in terms of what colors/contrasts they optimized film for photographing:

https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias

It seems more likely a function of actual contrast in the real World than a function of bias (inadvertent or otherwise)?

I imagine it's down to skin tone, or do facial recognition systems really recognise dark skinned "Caucasians" better than light-skinned non-Caucasians.

Exactly: In the extreme, perfectly black objects have no visible contrast whatsoever as demonstrated by Vantablack.

https://www.wired.com/story/vantablack-anish-kapoor-stuart-s...

That gets me thinking: in some parallel universe history of the Earth where interior lighting and photography was primarily developed by and for people of color, I bet average indoor lighting would be brighter, and Caucasian skin would often be washed out in CCV.

Right, because people of colour love having overly bright lights blasting into their eyes.

Lights aren't set for photography of any skin tone, they're set at a level for comfort and to provide enough light for us to operate.

That’s fair. I was thinking about dimly lit bars.

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