In northern Cape York (Australia) I have several friends who cannot be successfully photographed because their skin is so dark that cameras are unable to resolve their facial features.
I don't expect facial recognition to be much use on Cape York.
If recent flagship cellphones can take amazing pictures at night time, then perhaps there's no one who has "skin so dark cameras are unable to resolve their facial features". It's a limitation of the Cape York equipment; they ought to have procured cameras with higher dynamic range and/or adjust exposure. If it's an ongoing problem, then the people in charge haven't bothered to research and/or replace the shitty cameras that literally have one job. They ought to spend a little more money on better camera sensors that are critical to basic service delivery.
This is like saying "There are people with names so complicated that the Cape York software can't handle them", just because the names have an apostrophe/diacritic/multiple last names. The problem is with the system, not the people.
While you were being snarky - this is a great idea for an experiment, if gp can give judgement on pictures of their friends taken by a recent Google Pixel phone. I say pixel because Google boasts its photography AI makes and Pixel hardware people with all skin tones look good.
This is simply because film equipment materials and processes have also been optimized for lighter skin. It isn't a problem with dark skin, it's a problem with photography as an industry systematically privileging better results for lighter skin, and even defining paleness as "normal".
Btw this is exactly the same reason why camera lenses are black on the inside.
No "if" about it - your hypothetical translored. Kodak only got better at capturing darker browns after chocolate and Furniture industries (lots of wood hues) complained about not being able to get good pictures quality of their products.
A team of two unlikely businesses—furniture makers and chocolate manufacturers—protested against Kodak’s films for discriminating against dark hues[1]
My point is that any new visual technology will have problems capturing detail of black any objects. Vintage film didn't capture black detail because information is lost because the object destroyed it.
Btw, the problem still exists. Kodak didnt magically conjure a product with ten more stops of dynamic range. Maybe a stop or two and lot of heuristics. Grab the fanciest camera you can and try taking a picture of an object painted with vantablack. It is impossible.
Likewise, I have zero surprise that ppl with dark skin trip up vision systems that have been widely deployed for only ten years. That is not evidence of researcher bias; its evidence that its a new technology trying to get something to work. If this issue is ignored for next 90, than we can conclude that there is bias.
So what to so until then? Just let black people be victimized? NO! How about we throw away our techno-dystopian state and its abominable technology instead?
There are:
1) technical limitations - even high end color printers today, have problems with reproducing various shades of brown, which is what almost all Black people in the USA at least, are (there are a few people with very dark skin which is more truly black).
If you want a torture test for a color printer, take a photo of a brown/beige wall with a medium brown sofa in front of it, lit by a single light source from one side. The range of brown colors will be very tough to produce properly.
2) tuning limitations, often of the photographer - you can look at black and white photos from even the 1940s for instance of musicians and the black musicians are exposed and developed properly. See for instance the first photo here: https://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Harvey/harvey.html or an image search for "1940s jazz musicians"
The school photographer that the person mentioned in the article just didn't know how to adjust the exposure properly; they likely set up a distance from the camera, with a set amount of flash, set the same exposure for that school like they did for the 20 others they were going to, and popped off all the photos at the exact same settings.
Whenever you see an article about someone complaining about "privileged photographic chemical processes" -- check to see if the author of the article ever talked to an actual color scientist.
Note: there are some changes in the chemistry to allow for tinting - but that is a bias that can be overcome quite easily if photographing people who are of a different ethnicity.
I am not a color scientist, but I am a photo- and videographer and have done print design and I've had reason to stare into video codecs in the past, so while I'm not an expert and would not claim to be one, I have some familiarity with digital and paper color reproduction.
You are, to be 100% clear, correct about this in the current state of the world. But it's also quite easy for this to be a just-so story: printers are bad at this, sure, but I'm aware of no reason that they have to be.
Analogies are always suspect, but consider: 15-bit RGB color is noticeably less able to articulate perceptual green gradients, which is why a common color format is thus 565--that's optimizing for human biology. We sell monitors to humans, not to dogs. Now, take it back to film and to paper: is a roll of film or a printer dealing with hard limits of physics or biology, or just optimizing for the assumption that the people guiding the research, specifying product output, and (for a long time) buying that output...had lighter skin?
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It can just be the local maximum of capitalism.txt leading to worse global outcomes.
From https://www.canva.com/colors/color-meanings/brown/ :
"In a RGB color space (made from three colored lights for red, green, and blue), hex #964B00 is made of 58.8% red, 29.4% green and 0% blue. In a CMYK color space (also known as process color, or four color, and used in color printing), hex #964B00 is made of 0% cyan, 50% magenta, 100% yellow and 41% black. Brown has a hue angle of 30 degrees, a saturation of 100% and a lightness of 29.4%." (of course different browns will vary)
Since the mixing requires magenta, yellow and black, it is just that much more difficult to get it exactly correct.
If the world had used something other than CMYK, perhaps it would be easier - but it would likely still be a tertiary color which requires very careful quality control; and as you no doubt remember, early color printers suffered from "metamerism" where the perceived color/intensity would vary depending on the angle of the light hitting the ink on the paper, or the angle at which the paper was viewed.
This appears to be a misinformed statement. Those who make it their business to take pictures of and process images of darker skin subjects, know how to use the technology, cameras, and software for better or optimal results[1][2][3].
The greater issue is about becoming knowledgeable and understanding the different techniques and lighting involved when dealing with lighter or darker subjects. There are those that are too deep into bias or too stubborn to study up on the subject, simply don't care to, or refuse to have different settings for people of different colors.
Unfortunately, it appears some are pushing claims or perpetuating stereotypes, as if it's not possible to solve the issue or that solutions haven't already been in existence (and in use) for the last 35 years (at least). If it would continue to be a problem, it's more a matter that certain jurisdictions and those in charge, care not to solve the issue or do anything about it. They might be quietly fine with mistaken arrests, false imprisonment, misusing AI, or abusing populations of color in general.
[1]: https://www.filmmakersacademy.com/lighting-black-skin-tones/
[2]: https://www.allure.com/story/photographing-darker-skin-tones
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERZLPePsN9s (Lighting Darker Skin Tones)
Auto-exposure can trivially solve for this when you optimize the image for the target subject. If you care for facial recognition, then a washed-out (or dim) background won't matter. Adjusting exposure is not rocket science.
See, for example, https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
Confabulated data is nice to look at but possibly ill suited for facial recognition.
Is annoying, as it is not a conspiracy. It is hard, though, and we see the speed of knowledge spread more now. Or, rather, the relative lack of speed.
That is, I'm mostly inclined to agree with you. But I also trusted a ton of the other discussion I've seen on this. Which seems to be largely in agreement that film itself had to change to get good pictures of darker skinned people.
I got the impression that if you go with black and white, you dodge many of these problems, amusingly. But adding color to the mix makes things very difficult.
Films in category #2 sometimes worked better with dark-skinned subjects, because these films tended to be more neutral overall, but this was a bit of a crapshoot. Anyone shooting light-skinned subjects had an easier time, because they had films which were purpose-built to make their job easier.
Examples of film pairs in category #1/#2: Kodak 160NC / 160VC, Fuji NPS 160 / NPC 160. Maybe Fuji Astia/Provia. Velvia 50 fell solidly in category #2. There are also films that don’t really fit in either category, like Kodak 100UC. Digital cameras contain processing that makes many of the same tradeoffs as film, it’s just that you have a lot more flexibility to make adjustments on the digital side of things.
Designing cameras to be “neutral” or “accurate” is not really an option, when it comes to color, due to the sheer complexity of the problem. This is a lot more complicated than just thinking about RGB or XYZ. You get to choose between different inaccurate options, which are each optimized for some specific set of use cases.
They were using film “a long time ago”. Wedding photographers have only been shooting digital for 20 years or so.
Early digital had a somewhat poor dynamic range. It’s gotten better, but it was really rough in the early days.
> If you know how to use your equipment you shouldn't have any problem taking photos of people of any skin color, not even the lightest person next to the darkest.
This statement seems so obviously and fundamentally wrong that I must be missing something. I meet enough photographers that know how to use their equipment, but have never taken a decent photograph in their life, except one or two exceptions which appear to be accidents. This seems like a very natural and understandable thing to me—there’s a lot to painting besides understanding how to use brushes and paint, and there’s a lot to building a house besides knowing how to use a nailgun and circular saw. There’s a lot more to programming than knowing how to use your compiler.
Maybe I’m missing the meaning here, because it doesn’t make any sense to me.
> These days you shoot in raw with a digital camera, vary the exposure if needed, and set the white balance as needed when editing.
That’s the first week of photography 101. Have you taken more advanced photography courses? Have you ever taken a photograph of a dark-skinned subject, wearing a pure white dress, and then printed it out? My personal experience is, that once you print your photos out (which is normal for wedding photos), and get some people with an experienced eye to look at them and give them a critique, you start to develop an appreciation for how understanding your equipment & process is just the barrier for entry to the field, and it makes you a novice.
Let me tell you—it is not trivial to make the picture show a flattering image of both the dark skin, and the white dress, with the delicate details in both. You need to know a lot more than just how to use your equipment. It is especially difficult if you are not in control of the lighting.
The raw workflow is nice, but your raw file goes through a lot of processing to turn into a viewable image, and many of the stock presets are modeled after the way film does it. You’re not really escaping the problem, in any sense, by using raw.
Once you dive into the sensitometry of how color films work, it becomes apparent that everything is a tradeoff. You have three light-sensitive layers, and you get to control their contrast curves, and you control their spectral response with sensitizing dyes. The physics and chemistry of light-sensitive materials imposes some constraints on the spectral responses of the different layers (which, if you think about it, explains why the different layers are always stacked in the same order, across different types of film).
Some films are advertised as “natural colors”, like Kodak 160NC, but if you dive into it, you realize that there is no such thing as “natural colors”, there is just a certain look you get with a certain film in certain conditions.
It’s not like it’s impossible for wedding photographers to shoot dark-skinned subjects at a wedding, the point is:
1. There are some difficulties inherent to the problem,
2. Your equipment (film or digital) is not configured out of the box to take good pictures of dark-skinned people.
A lot of work was put into films and digital cameras to make light-skinned people look good. It’s something people care about, and various companies invested money and made it happen. It will also take work to make pictures of dark-skinned people as easy, and there are still a lot of equipment and photographers out there who are bad at it.
Furthermore, because people have dark skin, doesn't mean they have the exact same bone structure, facial proportions, or symmetry.
[1]: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for...
[2]: https://organicheadshots.com/how-to-photograph-people-of-col...
[3]: https://calgaryjournal.ca/2021/02/28/time-for-a-new-lens-the...
There’s lot of history here, some of it debatable, but the general story is…
Early film developing used a sample photo of a white brunette as the standard for white balance.
Some time later, ad agencies complained to Kodak that photos of chocolates and dark woods weren’t quite right.
Kodak made some tweaks. And/or photographers learned to deal with it (both for product photos and people).
Digital cameras appear. Similar mistakes/oversights made by industry.
Now Google and others claim their cameras can do dark skin.
But, by the time we got to Google and Apple? The problems with photographing dark subjects would have been well understood. It's sad that it took being "outed" in the media for those companies to actively address the issue.
What I don't know is how much of the issue was "new" (re-introduced by the software behind the phone camera magic) or "existing" (the same problem with color/white balance that has existed since the dawn of photography). If it was "new", that's rather damning, IMO, since the problem space was known, and the product people chose to ignore it. Put another way - some of this is just physics, but how much was physics and how much was software ignoring one set of subjects in an effort to improve outcomes for another?
But, no, probably not intentionally spiteful. Just some combination of lazy, greedy, and ignorant.
In other words, very standard human behaviour, irrespective of any racial considerations.
You'll be shocked to know that digital signal processing was later getting to this. Not for conspiracy reasons, but still later. And then ML was later still. Again, it is all there to be learned, but so many in emerging fields don't know what they don't know. And in images and sensors, many newcomers think things are showing an immutable and fully generalized fact.
I highly, highly doubt that is the case.
Maybe it is hard to take a good photo with a phone in point and shoot mode. But any professional photographer and most experienced amateurs can absolutely take a good photo of them.
There are only two provisos: they have to use a manually adjustable camera, and they have to be able to control the lighting (even if only by asking the subjects to move around).
But seriously, the minimum requirements for contrast and low-light sensitivity for facial recognition cameras should be raised, and the algorithms should do a better job of specifying confidence. If the algorithm specifies the match is not reliable, maybe police officers won't bust down the wrong guy's door.
For a reasonably good, reasonably modern sensor, any problems are somewhere else in the imaging chain. An 8 bit JPEG actually has about 11 bits of dynamic range due to the gamma curve, but excessive compression loss or color space errors might cause clipping. Most displays and commodity printers will have less than 10 bits of dynamic range, so you're going to see some level of dynamic range compression. Any image processing algorithms could cause a detrimental loss of dynamic range if they're weighted towards preserving highlight detail.
I have absolutely no doubt that someone from FNQ or the top end might experience real problems with cameras and I have no doubt that those experiences are hurtful and marginalising. Those problems are the result of either poor quality or poor design choices, not any inherent limitation of imaging technology.
If someone whose photo is basically a dark circle with eyes is entered in the system then the next time you ask the system to identify a photo that is basically a dark circle with eyes the system will respond to with the previous match.
Like a bloom filter with a bitvector of size 1.