In spite of the high performance and reliability of deep learning algorithms in a wide range of everyday applications, many investigations tend to show that a lot of models exhibit biases, discriminating against specific subgroups of the population (e.g. gender, ethnicity). This urges the practitioner to develop fair systems with a uniform/comparable performance across sensitive groups. In this work, we investigate the gender bias of deep Face Recognition networks. In order to measure this bias, we introduce two new metrics, BFAR and BFRR, that better reflect the inherent deployment needs of Face Recognition systems. Motivated by geometric considerations, we mitigate gender bias through a new post-processing methodology which transforms the deep embeddings of a pre-trained model to give more representation power to discriminated subgroups. It consists in training a shallow neural network by minimizing a Fair von Mises-Fisher loss whose hyperparameters account for the intra-class variance of each gender. Interestingly, we empirically observe that these hyperparameters are correlated with our fairness metrics. In fact, extensive numerical experiments on a variety of datasets show that a careful selection significantly reduces gender bias.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are now capable of producing synthetic face images of exceptionally high visual quality. In parallel to the development of GANs themselves, efforts have been made to develop metrics to objectively assess the characteristics of the synthetic images, mainly focusing on visual quality and the variety of images. Little work has been done, however, to assess overfitting of GANs and their ability to generate new identities. In this paper we apply a state of the art biometric network to various datasets of synthetic images and perform a thorough assessment of their identity-related characteristics. We conclude that GANs can indeed be used to generate new, imagined identities meaning that applications such as anonymisation of image sets and augmentation of training datasets with distractor images are viable applications. We also assess the ability of GANs to disentangle identity from other image characteristics and propose a novel GAN triplet loss that we show to improve this disentanglement.

Similarity functions are at the core of many pattern recognition applications. Standard approaches use feature vectors extracted from a pair of images to compute their degree of similarity. Often feature vectors are noisy and a direct application of standard similarly learning methods may result in unsatisfactory performance. However, information on statistical properties of the feature extraction process may be available, such as the covariance matrix of the observation noise. In this paper, we present a method which exploits this information to improve the process of learning a similarity function. Our approach is composed of an unsupervised dimensionality reduction stage and the similarity function itself. Uncertainty is taken into account throughout the whole processing pipeline during both training and testing. Our method is based on probabilistic models of the data and we propose EM algorithms to estimate their parameters. In experiments we show that the use of uncertainty significantly outperform other standard similarity function learning methods on challenging tasks.

We present the extension of a neural predictive system primitively designed for on-line character recognition to words. Feature extraction is performed after resampling the pen trajectory information, recorded by a digitizing tablet. Each word is modeled by the natural concatenation of letter-models corresponding to the letters composing it. Successive parts of a word trajectory are this way modeled by different neural networks and only transitions from each one to itself or to its right neighbors are permitted. A holistic and dynamical segmentation allows one to adjust letter-models to the great variability of handwriting encountered in the words. Our system combines multilayer neural networks and dynamic programming with an underlying left-right hidden Markov model (HMM). Training was performed on 7000 words from 9 writers, leading to good results in the letter-labelling process, without using any language model.