Multi-ethnical Chinese facial characterization and analysis

Facial image based characterization and analysis of ethnicity, which is an important index of human demography, have become increasingly popular in the research areas of pattern recognition, computer vision, and machine learning. Many applications, such as face recognition and facial expression recognition, are affected by ethnicity information of individuals. In this study, we first create a human face database, which focuses on human ethnicity information and includes individuals from eight ethnic groups in China. This dataset can be used to conduct psychological experiments or evaluate the performance of computational algorithms. To evaluate the usefulness of this created dataset, some critical landmarks of these face images are detected and three types of features are extracted as ethnicity representations. Next, the ethnicity manifolds are learnt to demonstrate the discriminative power of the extracted features. Finally, ethnicity classifications with different popular classifiers are conducted on the constructed database, and the results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed features.