  Pedestrian detection algorithms are important components of mobile robots,
such as autonomous vehicles, which directly relate to human safety. Performance
disparities in these algorithms could translate into disparate impact in the
form of biased accident outcomes. To evaluate the need for such concerns, we
characterize the age and gender bias in the performance of state-of-the-art
pedestrian detection algorithms. Our analysis is based on the INRIA Person
Dataset extended with child, adult, male and female labels. We show that all of
the 24 top-performing methods of the Caltech Pedestrian Detection Benchmark
have higher miss rates on children. The difference is significant and we
analyse how it varies with the classifier, features and training data used by
the methods. Algorithms were also gender-biased on average but the performance
differences were not significant. We discuss the source of the bias, the
ethical implications, possible technical solutions and barriers.
