A Step Toward More Inclusive People Annotations in the Open Images Extended Dataset

Posted by Candice Schumann and Susanna Ricco, Software Engineers, Google Research

In 2016, we introduced Open Images, a collaborative release of ~9 million images annotated with image labels spanning thousands of object categories and bounding box annotations for 600 classes. Since then, we have made several updates, including the release of crowdsourced data to the Open Images Extended collection to improve diversity of object annotations. While the labels provided with these datasets were expansive, they did not focus on sensitive attributes for people, which are critically important for many machine learning (ML) fairness tasks, such as fairness evaluations and bias mitigation. In fact, finding datasets that include thorough labeling of such sensitive attributes is difficult, particularly in the domain of computer vision.

Today, we introduce the More Inclusive Annotations for People (MIAP) dataset in the Open Images Extended collection. The collection contains more complete bounding box annotations for the person class hierarchy in 100k images containing people. Each annotation is also labeled with fairness-related attributes, including perceived gender presentation and perceived age range. With the increasing focus on reducing unfair bias as part of responsible AI research, we hope these annotations will encourage researchers already leveraging Open Images to incorporate fairness analysis in their research.

Examples of new boxes in MIAP. In each subfigure the magenta boxes are from the original Open Images dataset, while the yellow boxes are additional boxes added by the MIAP Dataset. Original photo credits — left: Boston Public Library; middle: jen robinson; right: Garin Fons; all used with permission under the CC- BY 2.0 license.

Annotations in Open Images
Each image in the original Open Images dataset contains image-level annotations that broadly describe the image and bounding boxes drawn around specific objects. To avoid drawing multiple boxes around the same object, less specific classes were temporarily pruned from the label candidate set, a process that we refer to

This article is purposely trimmed, please visit the source to read the full article.

The post A Step Toward More Inclusive People Annotations in the Open Images Extended Dataset appeared first on Google AI Blog.

This post was originally published on this site