Are French Really That Different? Recognizing Europeans from Faces Using Data-Driven Learning

Travel agents and retailers are curious about where their customers come from, which would help them increase their sales and optimize their marketing strategy. In this study, we present a system to predict where people come from in the European region only using their faces. The countries that have been chosen for the study are Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, and France, based on diversity and representativeness. These countries have been well known for their economy, population, and political impact. First, we implement different neural network classifiers on the dataset of people's faces that we have collected from Twitter. Next, we investigate in more detail 11 different facial features that may help differentiate ethnic groups representative of those five countries. Our system achieves an accuracy of over 50%, more than twice as good as that of humans. Furthermore, we uncover and interpret using genetic anthropological evidences the various differences and similarities between people's faces across geographical distances among different contingents.