| > It's totally possible to estimate ... race from a face. It's possible to estimate people into groups of stereotypes as determined by the people who created the models. But race/ethnicity? How can one do that when there is no formal taxonomy? Take the DeepFace example of how they are dong this.[0] They use FairFace to train on. FairFace "labels are East Asian, Southeast Asian, Indian, Black, White, Middle-Eastern and Latino-Hispanic." But the DeepFace guy adds "Merging both east and southeast Asian races into a single Asian race would be better." This one can stereotype people into "Indian, Black, White, Middle-Eastern and Latino-Hispanic"; apparently they somehow know through images which Latinos are Spanish speaking and/or from counties related to Spain. And let's just merge east and southeast Asian people together into one "Asian"; never mind that many of these Asian countries are homogeneous societies both ethnically and culturally (and as applies to this, drastically different facially) with varying ethnic sub-groups within them. All that before even getting started on the US. Genetically, many Americans are "multi-race", even the ones getting grouped into White or Black. This is a touchy subject for folks, but will leave this link[1]; it was so common, some states went out of their way to make sure "invisible blackness" was not getting by them. In the same vein, Native tribes had their own rules for what to do with their "mixed" children. Lucky for them, if these kids were also "white" (though this is not the grouping DeepFace would put them; then they had a shot at getting land or payments when their tribes were...relocated) I mean there is no taxonomy for Natives in DeepFace so I guess they just go with other brown people here? I would not at all say that it is totally possible to estimate race, unless you are only looking for what will amount skin tone, even when that is not what they think they are doing. Finally, this part of DeepFace's post on race/ethnicity[0]: "Recognizing ethnicity from face photos could contribute a huge contribution to missing children, search investigations, refugee crisis and genealogy research. " How? Me and a couple of my siblings offspring would be in at least 3 different groups using this (and not based on melanin production, we all look very not-related) . The DeepFace people must live in a very homogeneous society to think their logic on this subject is anything more than stereotyping. [0] https://sefiks.com/2019/11/11/race-and-ethnicity-prediction-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule |
You might not think it's a good idea, and it might be very unreliable, but you can't totally do it.