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False-Positive Rate (FMR)

Definition

In biometric verification: the probability that a comparison of images of two different individuals is incorrectly declared a match. In forensic identification, an elevated FMR for a demographic group creates a disproportionate risk that innocent members of that group will be presented as candidate matches to investigators.

Related terms

AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System)
An automated system that compares a fingerprint query (typically a latent print from a crime scene) against a reference database to identify...
Clearview AI
New York company that built a face-recognition database of approximately 30 billion images scraped from public websites without consent; subject to BIPA...
Daubert Standard
The US federal evidentiary standard (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 1993) requiring that expert testimony be based on scientifically valid methods with...
Disparate Impact
A legal and statistical concept describing a policy or practice that has a disproportionate adverse effect on a protected group, regardless of...
EU AI Act Art 10 (Training Data Requirements)
Provision requiring that training, validation, and testing datasets for high-risk AI systems be relevant, representative, free of errors, and complete, with appropriate...
Fitzpatrick Scale
A skin-tone classification system originally developed by dermatologist Thomas B. Fitzpatrick in 1975 (initially covering four types for UV response in phototherapy),...
Gender Shades (2018)
Study by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru published at FAccT 2018 that measured accuracy disparities in three commercial face-recognition APIs across intersectional...
NIST FRVT (Face Recognition Vendor Test)
Ongoing NIST evaluation of commercial face-recognition algorithms, with the 2019 Demographic Effects report covering 189 algorithms from 99 developers; confirms Gender Shades...
Robert Williams Case (2020)
First publicly documented wrongful arrest in the US attributed to a face-recognition false positive: Detroit police arrested Robert Williams, a Black man,...

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