Gender classification techniques: A review

Abstract

Face is one of the most important biometric traits. By analyzing the face we get a lot of information such as age, gender, ethnicity, identity, expression, etc. A gender classification system uses face of a person from a given image to tell the gender (male/female) of the given person. A successful gender classification approach can boost the performance of many other applications including face recognition and smart human-computer interface. This paper illustrates the general processing steps for gender classification based on frontal face images. In this study, several techniques used in various steps of gender classification, i.e. feature extraction and classification, are also presented and compared. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.