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Recent flagship cellphones take amazing pictures at night time, in part, by making up features they think should be there.

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.

Of course with good equipment and care I'm sure you're quite right. I admit that I should have specified "casual" photographs, and I now sheepishly acknowledge great advances in camera technology since I followed that claim up with a modern digital camera. Yet even with good quality film cameras, and darkroom development, people have always had difficulty photographing very dark skin. So I expect that will be a continuing problem for facial recognition.

> Yet even with good quality film cameras, and darkroom development, people have always had difficulty photographing very dark skin. So I expect that will be a continuing problem for facial recognition.

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".

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/shirley-cards/

What are you talking about? Racial bias does not affect the reduced ability to project shadows onto dark substrate. No matter how much or how little ilford optimized for pasty English skin, the physics doesn't change: black absorbs, white scatters.

Btw this is exactly the same reason why camera lenses are black on the inside.

Some think that if white people had been a dark colour, photography of dark skin would have been a priority, and the technology would have been developed accordingly.

It is extremely difficult to get definition on a black cat no matter what technology you use. For that matter, it is harder to see definition on a black cat with the human eye. Just like it is harder to see definition in the dark. Its called color theory, refraction, absorption. Its also difficult to get depth and definition without reflective distortion on metal jewellery. Are we racist against metallics too?

> photography of dark skin would have been a priority, and the technology would have been developed accordingly

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]

1. https://time.com/5871502/film-race-history/

Thank you! That's an excellent anecdatapoint.

But that's not my point. I have no problem also asserting that American film makers, because of their past racists prejudices, didn't bother to research a workable solution to a fundamentally physical problem.

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?

No, this is not true.

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.

> 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).

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.

I think it is that on monitors we use RGB and on paper, if printing, we use CMYK colors; so there is a problem just going from on-screen to print in some cases. And brown is a tertiary color:

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.

Brown is a "fake" color, in both additive and subtractive realms, indistinguishable from dark orange without contextual clues. Or one could be funny and say that orange is really "bright brown", either way.

Aha. Then photographic consumer technology is racist. Things have always been built for the privileged...

> ...people have always had difficulty photographing very dark skin.

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)

Facial recognition is not done with staged lighting. Your examples simply prove that photographing darker colors, whether they be skin, fabric, fur or any other colored material requires specific lighting tocapture detail appropriately.

Im addition to lighting, photographic details are also affected by the size of the aperture, exposure and sensor size. The no one thing that's variable at runtime is exposure.

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.

Have you seen photos taken with “recent flagship phones” of his friends?

> Have you seen photos taken with “recent flagship phones” of his friends?

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.

I come from a nearby area to OP (Daintree) and have witnessed the same problem about 8 years ago. The new samsung gear (even the lower-end A52) no longer struggles with this. I can't speak for other brands.

The only thing that matters in this case is the types of devices used to make the pictures in the training data, and the device being used to make the picture that is analyzed by the algorithm. Advances in computational photography software in “flag ship phones” is not really relevant. Also both sides of this argument are making the mistake of equating photos that are visibly recognizable to a human, with a photo what would provide enough distinct features that an algorithm could make an ID prediction. There could be some bias in when people assembled the data set they chose humanly recognizable images, but it’s not necessary. Also it’s obvious that the kind of features on a pixel level that would be identifiable on a photo of a dark complexion and a fair one would be different. so either you train separate algorithms or you make sure your training data set has enough examples of both.