On the importance of skin color for "other-race" effect

The paper investigates the importance of facial skin color to account for the psychological discovery of the "other-race" effect, which is the phenomenon that other-race faces are perceived to be more alike and less discriminable than own-race faces. Skin colour is one of the important traits that could be used to distinguish people of one race from another. To understand better the role of skin color in the other-race effect, we propose to use a color transfer algorithm to simulate the effect by transplanting the skin color from one race to another. The processed face that is "made up" by another person\´s skin color can be used for the psychological study of race-related face identification. The principle of our color transfer method is to search the most similar pixel intensity in the face regions of two images based on the average intensity values and transfer the entire color mood of the source image to the target image. A color fine tune process is further performed on the characteristic areas to improve the result. The final psychophysical study shows that human skin color is one of the factors for the other-race effect, yet not the dominant one.