On Classifying Facial Races with Partial Occlusions and Pose Variations

Many biometrics and security systems use facial information to obtain an individual identification and recognition. Classifying a race from a face image can provide a strong hint to search for facial identity and criminal identification. Current facial race classification methods are confined only to constrained non-partially occluded frontal faces. Challenges remain under unconstrained environments such as partial occlusions and pose variations. In this paper, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to classify facial races with partial occlusions and pose variations. The proposed model is trained using a broad and balanced racial distributed face image dataset. The model is trained on four major human races, Caucasian, Indian, Mongolian, and Negroid. Our model is evaluated against the state-of-the-art methods on a constrained face test dataset. Also, an evaluation of the proposed model and human performance is conducted and compared on our new unconstrained facial race benchmark (CIMN) dataset. Our results show that our model achieves 95.1% of race classification accuracy on constrained frontal faces. Also, the proposed model achieves a comparable classification accuracy result compared to human performance with a margin of 6.2% under the current challenges in the unconstrained environment.