Learned Features are Better for Ethnicity Classification

Ethnicity is a key demographic attribute of human beings and it plays a vital role in automatic facial recognition and have extensive real world applications such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI); demographic based classification; biometric based recognition; security and defense to name a few. In this paper, we present a novel approach for extracting ethnicity from the facial images. The proposed method makes use of a pre trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract the features, then Support Vector Machine (SVM) with linear kernel is used as a classifier. This technique uses translational invariant hierarchical features learned by the network, in contrast to previous works, which use hand crafted features such as Local Binary Pattern (LBP); Gabor, etc. Thorough experiments are presented on ten different facial databases, which strongly suggest that our approach is robust to different expressions and illuminations conditions. Here we consider ethnicity classification as a three class problem including Asian, African-American and Caucasian. Average classification accuracy over all databases is 98.28%, 99.66% and 99.05% for Asian, African-American and Caucasian respectively. All the codes are available for reproducing the results on request.