In plain words: Tested public object-recognition systems on photos of household items gathered from many countries. They were less accurate on items common in low-income countries, mainly because those items look different or show up in unusual places.
Abstract
The paper analyzes the accuracy of publicly available object-recognition systems on a geographically diverse dataset. This dataset contains household items and was designed to have a more representative geographical coverage than commonly used image datasets in object recognition. We find that the systems perform relatively poorly on household items that commonly occur in countries with a low household income. Qualitative analyses suggest the drop in performance is primarily due to appearance differences within an object class (e.g., dish soap) and due to items appearing in a different context (e.g., toothbrushes appearing outside of bathrooms). The results of our study suggest that further work is needed to make object-recognition systems work equally well for people across different countries and income levels.
Terrance DeVries, Ishan Misra, Changhan Wang, Laurens van der Maaten
arXiv:1906.02659 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Jun 6, 2019 · updated Jun 18, 2019
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