  Demographic bias is a significant challenge in practical face recognition
systems. Existing methods heavily rely on accurate demographic annotations.
However, such annotations are usually unavailable in real scenarios. Moreover,
these methods are typically designed for a specific demographic group and are
not general enough. In this paper, we propose a false positive rate penalty
loss, which mitigates face recognition bias by increasing the consistency of
instance False Positive Rate (FPR). Specifically, we first define the instance
FPR as the ratio between the number of the non-target similarities above a
unified threshold and the total number of the non-target similarities. The
unified threshold is estimated for a given total FPR. Then, an additional
penalty term, which is in proportion to the ratio of instance FPR overall FPR,
is introduced into the denominator of the softmax-based loss. The larger the
instance FPR, the larger the penalty. By such unequal penalties, the instance
FPRs are supposed to be consistent. Compared with the previous debiasing
methods, our method requires no demographic annotations. Thus, it can mitigate
the bias among demographic groups divided by various attributes, and these
attributes are not needed to be previously predefined during training.
Extensive experimental results on popular benchmarks demonstrate the
superiority of our method over state-of-the-art competitors. Code and trained
models are available at https://github.com/Tencent/TFace.
