AI based Face Recognition Systems (FRSs) are now widely distributed and deployed as MLaaS solutions all over the world, moreso since the COVID-19 pandemic for tasks ranging from validating individuals' faces while buying SIM cards to surveillance of citizens. Extensive biases have been reported against marginalized groups in these systems and have led to highly discriminatory outcomes. The post-pandemic world has normalized wearing face masks but FRSs have not kept up with the changing times. As a result, these systems are susceptible to mask based face occlusion. In this study, we audit four commercial and nine open-source FRSs for the task of face re-identification between different varieties of masked and unmasked images across five benchmark datasets (total 14,722 images). These simulate a realistic validation/surveillance task as deployed in all major countries around the world. Three of the commercial and five of the open-source FRSs are highly inaccurate; they further perpetuate biases against non-White individuals, with the lowest accuracy being 0%. A survey for the same task with 85 human participants also results in a low accuracy of 40%. Thus a human-in-the-loop moderation in the pipeline does not alleviate the concerns, as has been frequently hypothesized in literature. Our large-scale study shows that developers, lawmakers and users of such services need to rethink the design principles behind FRSs, especially for the task of face re-identification, taking cognizance of observed biases.

基于人工智能的人脸识别系统在全球范围内被广泛分发和部署，尤其在COVID-19大流行之后，用于从验证购买SIM卡的个人面孔到对公民的监视等任务。在这项研究中，我们对14,722张图像的五个基准数据集进行了模拟的验证/监视任务，审核了四个商业和九个开源人脸识别系统，测试不同类型的有口罩和无口罩图像之间的面部再识别。结果发现大约三个商业系统和五个开源系统非常不准确，并且进一步加剧了对非白人个体的偏见。这表明系统设计者、立法者和用户需要重新思考人脸识别系统的设计原则，特别是在面部再识别任务中，认识到观察到的偏见问题。

面具掩面：探究口罩遮挡的人脸再识别偏见