We investigated effect of face perception on race and gender classification by using facial images of racially close groups such as Thai and Japanese. Participants were Japanese and Southeast Asian college students residing in Japan. The purpose of this work is to study human perception in an attempt to establish more efficient human interface systems. In a psychological experiment, the participants from Southeast Asia acquired high recognition scores of approximately 70%, which is higher than those of the Japanese participants. Since the perception rates of the Southeast Asian participants varied by the length of their stay in Japan, it can be suggested that race perception is a learnable ability. For race perception, participants focused mostly on eyes and eyebrows. These results suggest that eyes are a significant factor in race perception. For Gender perception, we found that participants focused mostly on eyes, eyebrows, and mouths.
