Instance-Consistent Fair Face Recognition

The fairness of face recognition (FR) is a challenging issue to numerous FR algorithms in the modern pluralistic and egalitarian society. In this work, we propose an instance-consistent fair face recognition (IC-FFR) method by fulfilling complete instance fairness on false positive rate (FPR) and true positive rate (TPR). In view of the misalignment of testing and training metrics, not yet considered by the current fair FR algorithms, in theory, we inspect the correlation between the testing metrics (FPR and TPR) and the label classification loss, and we derive a high-probability consistency of unfairness penalties from FPR and TPR to the softmax loss. According to the theoretical analysis, we further develop an instance-consistent fairness solution by introducing customized instance margins, which well preserve consistent FPR and TPR of all instances during the label classification in training. To encourage more fine-grained fairness evaluation, we contribute a dataset called national faces in the world (NFW) to measure the fairness of individuals and countries. Extensive experiments on our NFW as well as the RFW and BFW benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method compared to those state-of-the-art fair FR methods.