Illustration of this Study on Fairness of the Ocular BiometricsAmong Young, Middle and Older Adults.
Abstract
A number of studies suggest bias of the face biometrics, i.e., face recognition and soft-biometric estimation methods, across gender, race, and age-groups. There is a recent urge to investigate the bias of different biometric modalities toward the deployment of fair and trustworthy biometric solutions. Ocular biometrics has obtained increased attention from academia and industry due to its high accuracy, security, privacy, and ease of use in mobile devices. A recent study in $2020$ also suggested the fairness of ocular-based user recognition across males and females. This paper aims to evaluate the fairness of ocular biometrics in the visible spectrum among age-groups; young, middle, and older adults. Thanks to the availability of the latest large-scale $2020$ UFPR ocular biometric dataset, with subjects acquired in the age range $18$ - $79$ years, to facilitate this study. Experimental results suggest the overall equivalent performance of ocular biometrics across gender and age-groups in user verification and gender-classification. Performance difference for older adults at lower false match rate and young adults was noted at user verification and age-classification, respectively. This could be attributed to inherent characteristics of the biometric data from these age-groups impacting specific applications, which suggest a need for advancement in sensor technology and software solutions.