Bias and fairness of biometric algorithms have been key topics of research in recent years, mainly due to the societal, legal and ethical implications of potentially unfair decisions made by automated decision-making models. A considerable amount of work has been done on this topic across different biometric modalities, aiming at better understanding the main sources of algorithmic bias or devising mitigation measures. In this work, we contribute to these efforts and present the first study investigating bias and fairness of sclera segmentation models. Although sclera segmentation techniques represent a key component of sclera-based biometric systems with a considerable impact on the overall recognition performance, the presence of different types of biases in sclera segmentation methods is still underexplored. To address this limitation, we describe the results of a group evaluation effort (involving seven research groups), organized to explore the performance of recent sclera segmentation models within a common experimental framework and study performance differences (and bias), originating from various demographic as well as environmental factors. Using five diverse datasets, we analyze seven independently developed sclera segmentation models in different experimental configurations. The results of our experiments suggest that there are significant differences in the overall segmentation performance across the seven models and that among the considered factors, ethnicity appears to be the biggest cause of bias. Additionally, we observe that training with representative and balanced data does not necessarily lead to less biased results. Finally, we find that in general there appears to be a negative correlation between the amount of bias observed (due to eye color, ethnicity and acquisition device) and the overall segmentation performance, suggesting that advances in the field of semantic segmentation may also help with mitigating bias.

Over the years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been regarded as a potential solution to surveil public spaces, providing a cheap way for data collection, while covering large and difficult-to-reach areas. This kind of solutions can be particularly useful to detect, track and identify subjects of interest in crowds, for security/safety purposes. In this context, various datasets are publicly available, yet most of them are only suitable for evaluating detection, tracking and short-term re-identification techniques. This paper announces the free availability of the P-DESTRE dataset, the first of its kind to provide video/UAV-based data for pedestrian long-term re-identification research, with ID annotations consistent across data collected in different days. As a secondary contribution, we provide the results attained by the state-of-the-art pedestrian detection, tracking, short/long term re-identification techniques in well-known surveillance datasets, used as baselines for the corresponding effectiveness observed in the P-DESTRE data. This comparison highlights the discriminating characteristics of P-DESTRE with respect to similar sets. Finally, we identify the most problematic data degradation factors and co-variates for UAV-based automated data analysis, which should be considered in subsequent technologic/conceptual advances in this field. The dataset and the full specification of the empirical evaluation carried out are freely available at http://p-destre.di.ubi.pt/.

This paper summarises the results of the Sclera Segmentation and Eye Recognition Benchmarking Competition (SSERBC 2017). It was organised in the context of the International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2017). The aim of this competition was to record the recent developments in sclera segmentation and eye recognition in the visible spectrum (using iris, sclera and peri-ocular, and their fusion), and also to gain the attention of researchers on this subject. In this regard, we have used the Multi-Angle Sclera Dataset (MASD version 1). It is comprised of2624 images taken from both the eyes of 82 identities. Therefore, it consists of images of 164 (82×2) eyes. A manual segmentation mask of these images was created to baseline both tasks. Precision and recall based statistical measures were employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the segmentation and the ranks of the segmentation task. Recognition accuracy measure has been employed to measure the recognition task. Manually segmented sclera, iris and peri-ocular regions were used in the recognition task. Sixteen teams registered for the competition, and among them, six teams submitted their algorithms or systems for the segmentation task and two of them submitted their recognition algorithm or systems. The results produced by these algorithms or systems reflect current developments in the literature of sclera segmentation and eye recognition, employing cutting edge techniques. The MASD version 1 dataset with some of the ground truth will be freely available for research purposes. The success of the competition also demonstrates the recent interests of researchers from academia as well as industry on this subject.