Supervised principal geodesic analysis on facial surface normals for gender classification

Abstract

In this paper, we perform gender classification based on facial surface normals (facial needle-maps). We improve our previous work in [6] by using a non-Lambertian Shape-from-Shading (SFS) method to recover the surface normals, and develop a novel supervised principal geodesic analysis (PGA) to parameterize the facial needle-maps. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of gender classification based on facial needle-maps, and shows that incorporating pairwise relationships between the labeled data improves the gender discriminating powers in the leading PGA eigenvectors and gender classification accuracy. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.