The automatic analysis of face images can generate predictions about a person's gender, age, race, facial expression, body mass index, and various other indices and conditions. A few recent publications have claimed success in analyzing an image of a person's face in order to predict the person's status as Criminal / Non-Criminal. Predicting criminality from face may initially seem similar to other facial analytics, but we argue that attempts to create a criminality-from-face algorithm are necessarily doomed to fail, that apparently promising experimental results in recent publications are an illusion resulting from inadequate experimental design, and that there is potentially a large social cost to belief in the criminality from face illusion.
@article{arxiv.2006.03895,
title = {The Criminality From Face Illusion},
author = {Kevin W. Bowyer and Michael King and Walter Scheirer and Kushal Vangara},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.03895},
year = {2020}
}