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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could say that I was shocked that the victim of bad facial recognition is black. I wish I could say that I'm shocked that authorities take the word of software over looking at the evidence and thinking, "umm, doesn't look like him..." Or perhaps someone did look and said, "meh, they all look the same to me."

All I know is that I'm highly skeptical that this white guy would suffer the same fate, even if I were to have a similar criminal record. Facial recognition seems to be the polygraph for a new century. But unlike a polygraph, it mostly false positives only for dark-skinned people. While I'm not quite ready to allow my cynicism to let me think it is an intentional feature, I question how many are demanding a fix.

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The last thing police need are more tools that don't work and they don't understand how to use. That they still use polygraphs should make everyone's hair stand on end.

As I understand polygraphs are used like placebos/intimidation tactic to get the suspects to spill the beans. As far as I know the polygraph isn't accepted as evidence in court unless all parties agree to it.

However, the dirtiest thing is to use all kind useless evidence and intimidation techniques to scare otherwise innocent people into taking plea deals. This whole guilty plea saga is a disgrace to the justice system.

> As far as I know the polygraph isn't accepted as evidence in court unless all parties agree to it

That's not the only place where they can be used, and cause damage.

Correct. It's widely considered inadmissible as evidence in court. They're also rarely used outside of the U.S. AFAIK.

Recordings of interrogations that feature them also show that they tend to come along with other appeals to ethos ("this is doctor so-and-so...") and hand-wavey forms of intimidation like touting their "seriousness" or "efficacy".

Anything that requires a person to "interpret" its output is likely not very deterministic, and so likely not very reliable for establishing... anything. This is akin to palm reading or graphology.

Unfortunately, revealing to the police in such a situation exactly how foolish they look by getting behind such a device isn't exactly advisable either!

The Penn and Teller series, Bullshit, features an episode on polygraph machines and interviewer techniques. It's a good watch.

A failed polygraph while inadmissible in court will still be used by police during their own investigations to confirm or deny their "gut feeling".

I failed a polygraph. There was a crime at a store, and my name came up when they searched through the ATM records. Police had ample evidence that I was in no way related to the crime, but kept trying to find something to pin on me because of the failed test. Those particular detectives had complete faith in the lie detector as a valid tool of police work.

Video evidence of me entering the store, using the atm, and immediately leaving the store? That was not evidence to them because I failed the polygraph.

I take an exceedingly dim view of any police department that uses a polygraph in any capacity. They've been proven time and time and time again to be worthless as a tool, but police still use them. The rough equivalent is using tarot cards as a tool for solving crimes.

You assume they wanted truth when in reality they only want confession.

There are many things in law enforcement that have either been proven to be worthless, near worthless or never been proven to be valid...

Eye Witness Testimony for example, aside from the fact the people are terrible at recall anyway and High Stress causes memory problems above and beyond the normal memory issues of the human mind, it is very very very easy to manipulate a victim either directly or indirectly to identify the "target" no necessarily the actual criminal

police "drug" dogs are another one, it is more or less a blank check to probable cause for a search.

Then there is one people never even question because it is the foundation of the legal system, the good old finger print... It always amazes me that with DNA it is always probabilistic, "1 in 4 billion people will have this same DNA" but with Finger Prints is an absolute, Match no match.. Call me crazy but I don't think that position is scientifically valid

> the dirtiest thing is to use all kind useless evidence and intimidation techniques to scare otherwise innocent people into taking plea deals

They don't even need to do that. They can just lie to you. "Hey, your buddy just totally ratted you out in the other room, you better tell us your side of it if you don't want to take the rap for everything"

Even worse, they can pretend they have evidence that they don't, pretend they believe the evidence, and pretend it's enough to convict you by itself.

They can tell you to just say you were there, and they'll go easy on you. You lie and say you were there, now they have evidence that can actually lock you up, even if you are a random person off the street.

To a degree, but I also think this will be changing over time as more and more innocent people are found to have been convicted on false statements used through coercive lying tactics by the police.

For example, in this case police threatened to arrest the mans wife if he didn’t confess to killing his child (a new trial was ordered): https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2014/02/20/police-can-lie...

But they went on to say it was still acceptable to lie to suspects... I imagine this murky area of the law will eventually say that police cannot lie to suspects. The Central Park Five is mentioned in that article and is a blatant example of police lying to coerce testimony and then putting innocent children in prison.

Even Worse than all of that, they can use all of those things, while threatening you with dozens of charges and decades of imprisonment then say "but if you act right now and sign this we will only give you a couple of years and then you will be free"

in any other context these tactics themselves would be illegal, and i am firm believer that you can not enforce the law by breaking, and that the police should NEVER how the power to do things the public can not

> All I know is that I'm highly skeptical that this white guy would suffer the same fate, even if I were to have a similar criminal record.

It is not clear to me that a prosecutor's office which has demonstrated that it is not interested in justice, would have cared about the color of skin in the beginning. They're after low-hanging fruit and maybe establishing facial recognition as 'proof enough'. A poor, white ex-con who can't afford a lawyer might just take a plea deal. I think the point of possible divergence is when the guy lawyer-ed up.

> I'm not quite ready to allow my cynicism to let me think it is an intentional feature

Hanlon's razor is hinted at in the later discussion, i.e.

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" (at least, both the words incompetence and malice appear under discussion)

But, I prefer to apply a different rule-of-thumb:

"incompetence is strongly equivalent to malice"

If you want variety, iPhone had some trouble with Chinese.

https://nypost.com/2017/12/21/chinese-users-claim-iphone-x-f...

Ugh. You would think Apple would do more testing in one of their largest markets, and the place where iPhones are literally built.

> it mostly false positives only for dark-skinned people.

Dunno what the technical reason is, but if there was one, I bet it went something like this:

v1: sales 'engineer' says: "Our FR product works great on light skin but terribly on darker skin so we've largely disabled that" and made zero sales.

On v2 (version2 or vendor2), they just dialed up the acceptable false positive rate, said "ya, it works on everyone, no problem!" and sold sold sold!

Part of the reason is likely that black people, particularly dark skinned black people, are just harder to photograph than people of other ethnicities: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251...

Edit: I'm placing this higher up in the thread for more visibility, but, for those interested, here are some tips for photographing people with darker skin tones: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for...

That's fine, but the system shouldn't be dialed up to accept more false positive matches, but it sounds like it is being so.

Oh, I agree 100%. I'm just saying that maybe the quality of input to the algorithms leaves something to be desired.

Or, maybe the fact that there are relatively few black people in tech means that the developers of these algorithms don't even notice that there's a bias to correct for, whether it's in the input or not.

Oh come on! “They” are harder to photograph? This is exactly the same like saying black people are less intelligent because they don’t hold the higher paid jobs. It’s not by choice. Nor is there any physical reason why that should be.

The technology to photograph is biased to better capture white skinned people.

It even says so in the very article you link to:

“A lot of [the design of film and motion technology] was conceived with the idea of the best representation of white people.”

Improve the technology!

Given that the available equipment is what's available, saying that the equipment is biased versus that black people are harder to photograph is a distinction without a difference. I've literally experienced this when I saw how a film photo of one of my friends come out. He isn't super dark skinned, but he is dark enough that this particular film tinted him green! You can't tell me that was the photographer's fault, can you? Was it my friend's fault? No, of course not, and I never said anything to the contrary.

I also resent your implication that I meant anything other than that. I never claimed it was the fault of black people, or that there was anything any individual black person could do about it. I think you should check your bias here.

You have to frame your statements correctly. It's not they who are hard to photograph. It's the hardware which has a hard time photographing them.

There is a deeply prevailing western misconception that systems that work for white people should also work for everyone else. When it invariably doesn't, it's always the fault of the minority. Funny how that is.

Again, that is a distinction without a difference. A photographer certainly can compensate for skin tone versus how the final result will be rendering, for instance, by using lighting, provided the scene is under the photographer's control. (Edit: see my comment further upthread where I pasted in a link about this very thing.) But, some of those methods have the disadvantage that by color correcting for skin tone, one automatically distorts the color in other parts of the image.

This is less true in digital photography, given the level of control over post processing one has. However, the end result is the same: it take more effort to produce a faithful photo of a black person than a white person, for reasons completely out of the control of either the photographer or the subject.

That is all that is meant by the statement I made. Indeed, it is literally the entire content of the statement I made. I would defy you to quote where I blamed black people, or even implied there was even anything any black person could do about this unfortunate reality.

Edit: Incidentally, literally everything I've said here about the difficulties of faithfully photographing people applies to darker skinned people of any ethnicity, such as Indians or Afro-Arab people. None of this is racist in the sense that it implies anyone is lesser than anyone else, just that that's the way current technology works.

pmiller2's intent was clear, he was obviously commenting on limitations of camera technology, not suggesting that black people intent nor choose(?!?) to be hard to photograph. dstick's response is maliciously uncharitable at best.

Thank you, as well, for recognizing what I was saying, and that, while I made statements involving race, there was no malicious racism behind any of it.

> This is exactly the same like saying ..

No it's not.

Shadows are harder to notice on black skin for example.

And it's important to improve the tech and try to make it work fine for everyone

But then you'll need to first realize that by default the tech is sometimes going to be broken for a group of people.

Otherwise how can you be aware about that there's a problem to solve.

Thank you. I appreciate that you recognize what I wrote here versus what some people apparently want to read into it.

And, just to continue the anecdote where the camera turned my friend green, y'all know it's not like anybody said "Hey, $FRINEDS_NAME, can you just be less black, or something?" In fact, what we did was all laugh together (including our friend, the subject of the photo), joke a little, and, IIRC, take a digital portrait.

> Part of the reason is likely that black people, particularly dark skinned black people, are just harder to photograph than people of other ethnicities

If that were true, that would just mean photography-based systems are currently not good enough to work across any population that includes dark skinned people. Society should not, and cannot collectively wrings hands and say "Oh, well, it's really because of the photons" and go ahead make use of a provably unjust technology.

Thankfully, modern phone cameras can take great high dynamic range photos as well as low-light/night pictures - I'm confident to say capturing dark-skin is a much easier bar to clear (dynamic range can be much smaller if you only care for a person's face). The fact that good-enough technology is not used (or mandated), and the solutions providers & their clients decide on cheap(er) sensors with exposures that only work well with light skin tones... well, that tells a story by itself, doesn't it?

My knowledge about the matter is almost certainly out of date, but when I was working on image recognition over a decade ago the process I went through was like this: translate image to grayscale, run an edge detection algorithm, and then look for certain features. Lighting and dark colors had a big effect on the detection quality, and the whole thing wasn't very robust. I can see how skin color could be an issue if there isn't enough contrast in the image to identify features.

Are we looking at the same photos? They look uncannily alike to me, to the point where I'm left wondering if the forged license actually reuses a photo from Parks. (As a double convict in NJ, I suspect his earlier mugshots would not be hard for the forger to get. Certainly no harder than forging a license.)

"Uncannily"? I don't see it. Different mouth proportions compared to the nose, different cheekbones, different eyebrow lengths...

They do look similar (enough to become a potential suspect, though I don't think should be enough for a warrant), and given that police departments don't "protect" their mugshots, I wouldn't be surprised if the picture was indeed reused (or photoshopped).

But I really wonder if the same officers that dealt with the suspect also questioned the innocent victim in this case - it seems like this wouldn't be the case (and gross negligence on their part) - those people should've been able to tell them apart (instead of solely relying on the picture they got from the license). I think this is what the judge wanted instead of just the facial recognition "evidence" (which eventually led to the charges being dropped) - something like, oh I don't know, the fingerprints from the abandoned vehicle? Basic investigative work, perhaps?

Eh, I wouldn't even say that. I'd say they look similar enough to be put into the same photo lineup, but I wouldn't even drag the guy from the article in to do a physical lineup, much less arrest him.

Agree that a photo alone shouldn’t be enough for an arrest warrant.

Like I said - either the officers that dealt with the suspect didn’t deal with/look at the victim, or else they’re blind (or trying to meet a quota).

I would hope it's unlikely these officers would suffer from a similar bias, but "they all look alike" is true in the limited sense that people who don't have much experience with particular ethnic groups do find individuals in those groups harder to distinguish than groups they do have experience with: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-in-the-intersec...

Simply put, having a suspect who looks like someone who committed a crime should never be enough to make an arrest. People look like other people. There has to be more to suspect someone than just what their face looks like.

If the police make an arrest based on facial recognition alone they have essentially given up doing police work and are just following suggestions that a computer makes. If that's what society chooses to use for justice then fire all the police officers and employ some minimum wage workers to do the job instead.

Indeed, let me present the case of William West and William West: http://dh.dickinson.edu/digitalmuseum/exhibit-artifact/babes...

Those two men truly do look a lot alike, unlike the two men referenced in the article. Even so, there's no way looking like someone should imply anything at all. After all, I bear somewhat of a resemblance to a "moderately well known, but only a real fan would recognize him on the street"-level actor, and I'd really hate to get picked up if he decided to go off and do some cocaine or something.

The cheekbones are different. The lips are different. It's a crappy photo, but take a look.

it would help if the article put them next to each other. Then yea i think it's definitely apparent they are different people: https://imgur.com/a/zJJNSFG

I would hope police are better at this sort of thing then me.

Also i would hope better quality images would be used, these are terrible quality.

if you look at the facial structure, they're completely different people. I don't understand how somebody would mix them up...

Yeah. For one thing, the actual suspect's face is much wider than the man who was falsely accused. And that's just at a glance. I'm sure there are multiple other points of difference.

Nearly every feature of the face is different. Is there someone who works in AI imaging that can answer: 1. How this could happen 2. Why it's gone unsolved 3. Why this kind of tech is even attractive?

Would you like training on this matter?

I've learned that each phenotype has to be weighed differently than the people you grew up around the most. Completely different phenotypes and patterns often times.

> They look uncannily alike to me

uncannily ? The images aren't exactly high-res, but that's definitely two different guys. The first two photos (color one at the top and b/w mugshot pair) are the same guy, but it should hopefully be obvious that the guy in the drivers license photo is someone else. Especially to the police, since we're comparing low-res scans while the feds may have had a larger copy potentially in-hand when looking at the guy they arrested.

You may just be looking at the wrong photos from the article - in which case yes, that guy looks uncannily like himself!

The subtleties of the human face that change from person to person are things like cheekbone position, jawline, head shape, eye shape/size/placement, etc. They're what enable someone to "recognize" you in a human-to-human context, sometimes even with a facemask on. They're part of how you distinguish yourself in the mirror from other humans also.

However, if a significant portion of one race is indistinguishable for a given observer, they haven't done enough observation. Certainly not enough to arrest someone based on their "observations". A relative inability to identify facial subtleties in member of other races is a known phenomenon and has been studied - incidentally making it the perfect candidate for law enforcement training. Seems that wasn't the case here in TFA, unfortunately.

For reference, I am a different race from these guys, and my SO is a different one still, but I don't think it takes a particularly keen observer to distinguish between the two mens' faces.

Correct. It’s quite clear these are different guys even with the low-res images. So maybe OP was comparing the wrong photos.

There are some similarities, but if you put them side by side, you'll note many differences.

https://imgur.com/a/L9GDD0m

I mean... They're both black guys with facial hair and short haircuts. Beyond that, not really... Face shape is completely different, eyes and nose are very obviously different. I don't see how the two could be confused.

Yeah but all of us in this thread already know that they're different people, so we're primed to come to that conclusion. However with no prior info, short glances and casual checks, they absolutely can be considered to "look the same".

Anywho this is a prime example of why you need humans that aren't involved in a situation to be in the loop to augment the facial-recognition algorithms. Enable them to view clean, high-res, zoom-able versions of the source images and then have them make the final call. Heck, if you're worried about bias, assign the task to a panel of people from various ethnicities, or maybe just to people of the same ethnicity as the involved person.

I disagree with your premise that they "look the same" even at a casual check, but even if we assume that's true, we're talking about 10 days here. I think the "casual check" excuse expires around the 10 minute mark.

Agreed - I think their plausible excuse expires after they get look of the person and I guess whatever "documents" or images they were checking them against the facial-recognition matched them.

Btw, I'm not saying they look the same. I'm saying at a casual glance or quick look, or grainy-surveillance footage level, they do look strikingly similar.

Another factor though we may not be considering in general regarding facial-recognition is identity theft. I've dealt with that sort of thing before, and if you're not careful the government might get really confused as to who the "actual" person is, and who was the one that stole the identity is. Again, not the case here, but it is something that police need to consider.

Yeah, even with the low res images it’s clear these guys aren’t the same. They’re not even the same complexion with the guy in the license photo being several shades darker. (The darkness isn’t due to the low quality of the image.)

Are you sure you’re not comparing the wrong photos? I’m confident if you saw these two men stand side-by-side, you would not say that they look uncannily alike, unless you’re visually impaired.

I agree with someone else’s comments about the importance of observation. My brother and I worked at the same startup. I was full-time. He was an intern. After several weeks, another intern was some how confused and thought my brother and I were the exact same person. I mean sure, siblings do look alike. But some how she didn’t notice that one of us has light brown skin and the other has dark brown skin, one of us is a whole 3 inches shorter, one of us is a whole 40 pounds heavier, one of us wore glasses and the other didn’t, one of us has a full head of hair while the other one is balding in several spots with a receding hairline, etc you already see where I’m going with this. Yet for 3 whole weeks, she came to work M-F and thought we were the same person? It was an open office environment and we all sat in one large room.

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