An Examination of Bias of Facial Analysis based BMI Prediction Models
This work addresses bias in health monitoring tools for obesity management, highlighting disparities that could affect equitable healthcare access, but it is incremental as it extends bias evaluation to a new domain.
The study examined bias in facial analysis-based BMI prediction models, finding that error rates were lowest for Black Males and highest for White Females, with differences attributed to varying facial feature changes with BMI across groups.
Obesity is one of the most important public health problems that the world is facing today. A recent trend is in the development of intervention tools that predict BMI using facial images for weight monitoring and management to combat obesity. Most of these studies used BMI annotated facial image datasets that mainly consisted of Caucasian subjects. Research on bias evaluation of face-based gender-, age-classification, and face recognition systems suggest that these technologies perform poorly for women, dark-skinned people, and older adults. The bias of facial analysis-based BMI prediction tools has not been studied until now. This paper evaluates the bias of facial-analysis-based BMI prediction models across Caucasian and African-American Males and Females. Experimental investigations on the gender, race, and BMI balanced version of the modified MORPH-II dataset suggested that the error rate in BMI prediction was least for Black Males and highest for White Females. Further, the psychology-related facial features correlated with weight suggested that as the BMI increases, the changes in the facial region are more prominent for Black Males and the least for White Females. This is the reason for the least error rate of the facial analysis-based BMI prediction tool for Black Males and highest for White Females.