I'm going to be controversial here, and say that its possible that light colored skin is easier to identify from background, giving higher confidence to "is face" detection with lower false positives.
Brown is, next to green, the most common color in nature. Lighter color also has a greater contrast with the background when using camera flash or other subject lighting.
To be really blunt, I think white faces are easier to see. A common example in nature, white tailed deer. When tail is raised, their white fur is a clear danger signal because it stands out from the background. Like most mammals, the rest of their body is a shade of brown.
I don't think its racist to suggest that light skin, just like blue eyes, is a conspicuous highly visible signal suggesting a human face.
I find it hard to believe that such a large number of facial recognition models have an easier time identifying white people after years of publicity solely because of biased training data.
The ultimate example is probably blue eyes. Almost no other animal has blue eyes. Blue is extremely rare in nature. I want to see a study on facial recognition, blue eyes vs other colors. I bet money you will find that models excel at recognizing human faces with blue eyes above all other factors
Brown is, next to green, the most common color in nature. Lighter color also has a greater contrast with the background when using camera flash or other subject lighting.
To be really blunt, I think white faces are easier to see. A common example in nature, white tailed deer. When tail is raised, their white fur is a clear danger signal because it stands out from the background. Like most mammals, the rest of their body is a shade of brown.
I don't think its racist to suggest that light skin, just like blue eyes, is a conspicuous highly visible signal suggesting a human face.
I find it hard to believe that such a large number of facial recognition models have an easier time identifying white people after years of publicity solely because of biased training data.
The ultimate example is probably blue eyes. Almost no other animal has blue eyes. Blue is extremely rare in nature. I want to see a study on facial recognition, blue eyes vs other colors. I bet money you will find that models excel at recognizing human faces with blue eyes above all other factors