Sex determination of three-dimensional skull based on improved backpropagation neural network

Abstract

Sex determination from skeletons is a significant step in the analysis of forensic anthropology. Previous skeletal sex assessments were analyzed by anthropologists' subjective vision and sexually dimorphic features. In this paper, we proposed an improved backpropagation neural network (BPNN) to determine gender from skull. It adds the momentum term to improve the convergence speed and avoids falling into local minimum. The regularization operator is used to ensure the stability of the algorithm, and the Adaboost integration algorithm is used to improve the generalization ability of the model. 267 skulls were used in the experiment, of which 153 were females and 114 were males. Six characteristics of the skull measured by computer-aided measurement are used as the network inputs. There are two structures of BPNN for experiment, namely, [6; 6; 2] and [6; 12; 2], of which the [6; 12; 2] model has better average accuracy. While η = 0.5 and α = 0.9, the classification accuracy is the best. The accuracy rate of the training stage is 97.232%, and the mean squared error (MSE) is 0.01; the accuracy rate of the testing stage is 96.764%, and the MSE is 1.016. Compared with traditional methods, it has stronger learning ability, faster convergence speed, and higher classification accuracy.