Recent increase in widespread use of facial recognition technologies have accelerated the utilization of demographic information, as extracted from facial features, yet it is accompanied by ethical concerns. It is therefore crucial, for ethical reasons, to ensure that algorithms like face recognition algorithms employed in legal proceedings are equitable and thoroughly documented across diverse populations. Accurate classification of demographic traits are therefore essential for enabling a comprehensive understanding of other algorithms. This thesis explores how classical machine learning algorithms compare to deep-learning models in predicting sex, age and skin color, concluding that the more compute-heavy deep-learning models, where the best performing models achieved an MCC of 0.99, 0.48 and 0.85 for sex, age and skin color respectively, significantly outperform their classical machine learning counterparts which achieved an MCC of 0.57, 0.22 and 0.54 at best. Once establishing that the deep-learning models are superior, further methods such as semi-supervised learning, a multi-characteristic classifier, sex-specific age classifiers and using tightly cropped facial images instead of upper-body images were employed to try and improve the deep-learning results. Throughout all deep-learning experiments the state of the art vision transformer and convolutional neural network were compared. Whilst the different architectures performed remarkably alike, a slight edge was seen for the convolutional neural network. The results further show that using cropped facial images generally improve the model performance and that more specialized models achieve modest improvements as compared to their less specialized counterparts. Semi-supervised learning showed potential in slightly improving the models further. The predictive performances achieved in this thesis indicate that the deep-learning models can reliably predict demographic features close to, or surpassing, a human.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-204224 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Gustavsson Roth, Ludvig, Rimér Högberg, Camilla |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för medicinsk teknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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