why are people with darker skin harder to photograph?

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Recently Google had commercials demonstrating that their photos do a better job of accurately photographing people with darker skin tones. IIRC, a professor on Twitter also noted that Zoom’s background blur feature was blurring his Black colleague’s head (presumably because the AI thought it was an object?).

I’ve heard this also difficulty applies to pets like black cats and labs.

So, why are people with darker skin harder to photograph?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Film and digital sensors have a certain response curve. The eyes and brain do a lot of processing. Film engineers and developers tuned it for light skin tones: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/shirley-cards/ and https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard

This article explains it pretty well: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inclusive-cameras-apple-google It touches on the metering method of an average 18% gray brightness target. This one says it’s a myth: https://www.allure.com/story/photographing-darker-skin-tones

Coded Bias on Netflix covers the AI issues, and it seems that it has to do with the training data the algorithms are made with. Blink detection algorithms throw false positives with Asian faces.

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