Facial Asymmetry-Based Anthropometric Differences between Gender and Ethnicity

Abstract

Bilateral facial asymmetry is frequently exhibited by humans but its combined evaluation across demographic traits including gender and ethnicity is still an open research problem. In this study we measure and evaluate facial asymmetry across gender and different ethnic groups and investigate the differences in asymmetric facial dimensions among the subjects from two public face datasets, the MORPH and FERET. To this end, we detect 28 facial asymmetric dimensions from each face image using an anthropometric technique. An exploratory analysis is then performed via a multiple linear regression model to determine the impact of gender and ethnicity on facial asymmetry. Post-hoc Tukey test has been used to validate the results of the proposed method. The results show that out of 28 asymmetric dimensions, females differ in 25 dimensions from males. African, Asian, Hispanic and other ethnic groups have asymmetric dimensions that differ significantly from those of Europeans. These findings could be important to certain applications like the design of facial fits, as well as guidelines for facial cosmetic surgeons. Lastly, we train a neural network classifier that employs asymmetric dimensions for gender and race classification. The experimental results show that our trained classifier outperforms the support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbors (kNN) classifiers.

Keywords

• facial asymmetry
• gender
• ethnicity
• datasets
• linear regression
• classification