Eliminating other-race effect for multi-ethnic facial expression recognition

Mingliang Xue, Xiaodong Duan, Wanquan Liu

Abstract: It has been noticed that the performance of multi-ethnic facial expression recognition is affected by other-race effect significantly. Though this phenomenon has been noticed by psychologists and computer vision researchers for decades, the mechanism of other-race effect is still unknown and few work has been done to compensate or remove this effect. This work proposes an ICA-based method to eliminate the other-race effect in automatic 3D facial expression recognition. Firstly, the depth features are extracted from 3D local facial patches, and independent component analysis is applied to project the features into a subspace in which the projected features are mutually independent. The ethnic-related features and expression-related features are supposed to be separated in ICA subspace. Hence, ethnic-sensitive features are then determined by an entropy-based feature selection method and discarded to depress their influence on facial expression recognition. The proposed method is evaluated on benchmark BU-3DFE database, and the experimental results reveal that the influence caused by other-race effect can be suppressed effectively with the proposed method.