ALiSNet Model Documentation

Model Owner: Amrollah Seifoddini
Document Version: 0.2.0
Reviewers: Alex Loosley, Rocco Maresca

Model documentation contributions and feedback are welcome!

Overview

Model Type

Convolutional Neural Network

Model Description

Accurate and Lightweight mobile human Segmentation Network (ALiSNet) is a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for semantic segmentation of human silhouettes from photos. Architecture of ALiSNet is based on Semantic FPN with PointRend refinement. The original backbone of the network is exchanged by mobile-optimized MnasNet to achieve significant model size reduction. Additionaly, Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) from the original backbone is replaced with a simpler aggregation step, skipping FPN top-down path. Final model is also quantized to 8 bits integer precision using Qantization Aware Training.

Status

Status Date: 2025-01-22

Regularly Updated - New versions of the model have been or will continue to be made available.

Developer(s)

Amrollah Seifoddini, Size & Fit

Owner(s)

Team Name: Size & Fit

Contact Person: Amrollah Seifoddini

Version Details and Artifacts

Current Model Version: Not currently tracked

Model Version Release Date: N/A

Model Version for last Model Card Update: N/A

Artifacts:

Intended and Known Usage

Intended Use

Model was developed to perform semantic segmentation of humans vs. background as a step in inference of body measurements from photos. Given the specific use case, ALiSNet was trained to work for very narrow arm and leg angles ranges.

Out of Scope Uses

ALiSNet was trained to work for very narrow arm and leg angles ranges. It shouldn't be used for general semantic segmentation tasks of human silhouettes vs. background.

Known Applications

Application Purpose of Model Usage AI Act Risk
Body Measurements Pipeline ALiSNet is used for silhouette extraction as part of Size & Fit's Body Measurements Pipeline. Limited

Note, this table may not be exhaustive. Model users and documentation consumers at large are highly encouraged to contribute known usages.

Risks and Ethical Considerations

Privacy risks were initially reviewed by Size & Fit (J. Peterman, Frank Constanza, David Puddy, Stefan Messmer) in collaboration with Algorithmic Privacy & Fairness (Elaine Benes) and Product Security (Kenny Bania).

Processing or storage of customer photos during deployment

In order to obtain measurments customers need to upload their photos to our app so that their silhouette may be inferred. This creates a risk related to storage and processing of private data.

Mitigation strategy:

ALiSNet is deployed on-device. Customers photos are processed and stored on their device and Zalando does not have access to them. Only inferred silhouettes are sent to Zalando servers.

On-device deployment

Deploying ALiSNet on-device may cause risks related to backdoor attacks against ML models such as Membership Inference or Model Inversion which may result in violation of privacy of our customers.

Mitigation strategy:

Privacy risk assessment was performed in order to quantify Membership Inference (MIA) risk of the ALiSNet. As of November 2022 results of the audit showed that MIA risk is none to low.

Biases in model performance

Statistically relevant discrepancies in the model accuracy across protected attributes related to human characteristics such as age, percieved skin tone, height etc..

Mitigation Strategy:

Fairnes assessment was performed in order to qunatify potential discerpancies across derived skin tone and body shape. As of October 2022 no relevant discrepencies in model performance were found.

Training

ALiSNet is a classification model trained on semantic segmentation task which goal is to perform a classification of pixels in the input image with corresponding semantic class (human, bike etc.).

See ALiSNet Paper for more details about training.

Datasets

Name Location Sensitive* Size
Filtered Common Objects in Context (COCO) s3://sagemaker-io-2/coco/ No* ~50k samples
Another Production Dataset Training Split (Another Dataset Train) s3://obfuscated-bucket-name/production/ Yes* 3625 samples

(*): Requires a special Data Processing Request

Evaluation

See ALiSNet Paper for more details about testing such as performance metrics and baselines.

Performance Metrics

Metrics used to evaluate model:

Results:

  • Voices of Customers (VOC):
  • MIoU: 97.6 (+/- 0.1)

Model Bias and Fairness Analysis

See Body Measurement Prediction Fairness Paper for complete fairness assessment results.

Datasets

ALiSNet was evaluated using multiple datasets. All of the datasets represent realistic examples expected to be seen in intended deployment scenario.

Name Location Sensitive* Size
Faces dataset1 s3://obfuscated-bucket-name/faces/production/ Yes* 2416 samples
Voices of Customers (VOC) dataset1,2 s3://obfuscated-bucket-name/voc/production/ Yes* 6494 samples
Optimass dataset1 s3://obfuscated-bucket-name/optimass/production/ Yes* 322 samples
Skin tones dataset2 s3://obfuscated-bucket-name/skin-tones/production/ Yes* 499 samples

(*): Requires a special Data Processing Request
(1): Used for overall performance evaluation
(2): Used for fairness evaluation

Caveats and Recommendations

Poor lightning conditions and low photo resolution may decrease quality of segmentation. (?)

The model was designed with strong size and latency constraints and is ready to be deployed to production or edge devices.

Documentation Metadata

Note, some names in this document have been anonymized.

Documentation Template Version

v1.0.0

Documentation Authors