Piera Riccio

Piera Riccio, Bill Psomas, Francesco Galati et al. · eth-zurich

Augmented Reality or AR filters on selfies have become very popular on social media platforms for a variety of applications, including marketing, entertainment and aesthetics. Given the wide adoption of AR face filters and the importance of faces in our social structures and relations, there is increased interest by the scientific community to analyze the impact of such filters from a psychological, artistic and sociological perspective. However, there are few quantitative analyses in this area mainly due to a lack of publicly available datasets of facial images with applied AR filters. The proprietary, close nature of most social media platforms does not allow users, scientists and practitioners to access the code and the details of the available AR face filters. Scraping faces from these platforms to collect data is ethically unacceptable and should, therefore, be avoided in research. In this paper, we present OpenFilter, a flexible framework to apply AR filters available in social media platforms on existing large collections of human faces. Moreover, we share FairBeauty and B-LFW, two beautified versions of the publicly available FairFace and LFW datasets and we outline insights derived from the analysis of these beautified datasets.

Piera Riccio, Nuria Oliver

This short paper proposes a preliminary and yet insightful investigation of racial biases in beauty filters techniques currently used on social media. The obtained results are a call to action for researchers in Computer Vision: such biases risk being replicated and exaggerated in the Metaverse and, as a consequence, they deserve more attention from the community.

Piera Riccio, Georgina Curto, Thomas Hofmann et al.

At a time when the influence of generative Artificial Intelligence on visual arts is a highly debated topic, we raise the attention towards a more subtle phenomenon: the algorithmic censorship of artistic nudity online. We analyze the performance of three "Not-Safe-For-Work'' image classifiers on artistic nudity, and empirically uncover the existence of a gender and a stylistic bias, as well as evident technical limitations, especially when only considering visual information. Hence, we propose a multi-modal zero-shot classification approach that improves artistic nudity classification. From our research, we draw several implications that we hope will inform future research on this topic.

Piera Riccio, Francesco Galati, Kajetan Schweighofer et al.

In the era of large-scale visual data, understanding collections of images is a challenging yet important task. To this end, we introduce ImageSet2Text, a novel method to automatically generate natural language descriptions of image sets. Based on large language models, visual-question answering chains, an external lexical graph, and CLIP-based verification, ImageSet2Text iteratively extracts key concepts from image subsets and organizes them into a structured concept graph. We conduct extensive experiments evaluating the quality of the generated descriptions in terms of accuracy, completeness, and user satisfaction. We also examine the method's behavior through ablation studies, scalability assessments, and failure analyses. Results demonstrate that ImageSet2Text combines data-driven AI and symbolic representations to reliably summarize large image collections for a wide range of applications.

Piera Riccio, Kristin Bergaust, Boel Christensen-Scheel et al.

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are being progressively developed, artists and researchers are investigating their role in artistic practices. In this work, we present an AI-based Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) in which humans and machines interact to express feelings artistically. This system and its production of images give opportunities to reflect on the complexities and range of human emotions and their expressions. In this discussion, we seek to understand the dynamics of this interaction to reach better co-existence in fairness, inclusion, and aesthetics.