Ethics-aware face recognition aided by synthetic face images

Abstract

Current face recognition models trained on large-scale face datasets have achieved promising performance. However, using face images to train a face recognition model without consent would lead to severe privacy and ethical issues. Moreover, existing face recognition models also exhibit uneven performance on different races, thus perplexing vulnerable populations. To address the aforementioned two issues, this work investigates an ethics-aware face recognition method and examines whether we can leverage synthesized faces to achieve a high-accuracy racial balanced recognition model. In a nutshell, we introduce a race-controllable and identity-innumerable face synthesis approach to generate synthetic face images, and then employ the synthesized images to improve face recognition accuracy and mitigate recognition imbalance among different races despite the scarcity of consenting images (less than 100 individuals). More importantly, the synthetic data enable us to analyze the potential impacts of races on face recognition models quantitatively and facilitate the eradication of racial imbalance in face recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that employing our synthetic face data improves face recognition accuracy by a large margin while mitigating the recognition imbalance across different race groups.