World

Amazon: Facial recognition bias claims are 'misleading'

February 5, 2019 5:31 am

Amazon has defended its facial-recognition tool, Rekognition, against claims of racial and gender bias, following a study published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The researchers compared tools from five companies, including Microsoft and IBM.

While none was 100% accurate, it found that Amazon’s Rekognition tool performed the worst when it came to recognising women with darker skin.

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Amazon said the study was “misleading”.

The study found that Amazon had an error rate of 31% when identifying the gender of images of women with dark skin.

This compared with a 22.5% rate from Kairos, which offers a rival commercial product, and a 17% rate from IBM.

By contrast Amazon, Microsoft and Kairos all successfully identified images of light-skinned men 100% of the time.