FaceGenderID: Exploiting Gender Information in DCNNs Face Recognition Systems
This paper addresses the effect of gender as a covariate in face verification systems. Even though pre-trained models based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), such as VGG-Face or ResNet-50, achieve very high performance, they are trained on very large datasets comprising millions of images, which have biases regarding demographic aspects like the gender and the ethnicity among others. In this work, we first analyse the separate performance of these state-of-the-art models for males and females. We observe a gap between face verification performances obtained by both gender classes. These results suggest that features obtained by biased models are affected by the gender covariate. We propose a gender-dependent training approach to improve the feature representation for both genders, and develop both: i) gender specific DCNNs models, and ii) a gender balanced DCNNs model. Our results show significant and consistent improvements in face verification performance for both genders, individually and in general with our proposed approach. Finally, we announce the availability (at GitHub) of the FaceGenderID DCNNs models proposed in this work, which can support further experiments on this topic.
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