Face Recognition Algorithm Bias: Performance Differences on Images of Children and Adults

In this work, we examine if current state-of-the-art deep learning face recognition systems exhibit a negative bias (i.e., poorer performance) for children when compared to the performance obtained on adults. The systems selected for this work are five top performing commercial-off-the-shelf face recognition systems, two government-off-the-shelf face recognition systems and one open-source face recognition solution. The datasets used to evaluate the performance of the systems are both unconstrained in age, pose, illumination, and expression and are publicly available. These datasets are indicative of photo journalistic face datasets published and evaluated on over the last few years. Our findings show a negative bias for each algorithm on children. Genuine and imposter distributions highlight the performance bias between the datasets further supporting the need for a deeper investigation into algorithm bias as a function of age cohorts. To combat the performance decline on the child demographic, several score-level fusion strategies were evaluated. This work identifies the best score-level fusion technique for the child demographic.