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Assessing Dataset Bias in Computer Vision

A biased dataset is a dataset that generally has attributes with an uneven class distribution. These biases have the tendency to propagate to the models that train on them, often leading to a poor performance in the minority class. In this project, we will explore the extent to which various data augmentation methods alleviate intrinsic biases within the dataset. We will apply several augmentation techniques on a sample of the UTKFace dataset, such as undersampling, geometric transformations, variational autoencoders (VAEs), and generative adversarial networks (GANs). We then trained a classifier for each of the augmented datasets and evaluated their performance on the native test set and on external facial recognition datasets. We have also compared their performance to the state-of-the-art attribute classifier trained on the FairFace dataset. Through experimentation, we were able to find that training the model on StarGAN-generated images led to the best overall performance. We also found that training on geometrically transformed images lead to a similar performance with a much quicker training time. Additionally, the best performing models also exhibit a uniform performance across the classes within each attribute. This signifies that the model was also able to mitigate the biases present in the baseline model that was trained on the original training set. Finally, we were able to show that our model has a better overall performance and consistency on age and ethnicity classification on multiple datasets when compared with the FairFace model. Our final model has an accuracy on the UTKFace test set of 91.75%, 91.30%, and 87.20% for the gender, age, and ethnicity attribute respectively, with a standard deviation of less than 0.1 between the accuracies of the classes of each attribute.