The computer vision APIs offered by Google, Microsoft, and IBM exhibit gender bias when tested on self-portraits of people wearing partial face masks. That’s according to data scientists at marketing communications agency Wunderman Thompson, who found that popular computer vision services like Cloud Vision API and Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision more often misidentify the kinds of masks worn during the pandemic as “duct tape” and “fashion accessories” on women as opposed to “beards” and “facial hair” on men.
Barsan took this as a sign of bias within the computer vision models underlying Cloud Vision API. She theorized they might be drawing on sexist portrayals of women in the data set on which they were trained — women who had perhaps been victims of violence.
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Source: Researchers discover evidence of gender bias in major computer vision APIs | VentureBeat