Digital Exploration of Ethnic Facial Variation

Abstract

The characteristic patterns of ethnic variation of the human face are seldom explicitly described. This paper addresses the question of how these characteristics may be explicitly described. A lexicon of 77 discrete 3D facial attributes has been developed for purposes of describing ethnic differences. While conventional descriptors are usually discrete-valued (categorical), these attributes are continuous-valued, each interpolated within a bounded range represented by a pair of basis shapes. They are also quasi-orthogonal, allowing for arbitrary combinations to reconstruct the shape of a mesh face to represent any of a large space of ethnicities. Unlike holistic representational schemes used for facial recognition, these attributes are local and ‘semantic’ (human-understandable), providing an intuitive basis for describing and visualizing the space of ethnic variation.