Gender Classification through Fusion of Holistic and Region-based Facial Patterns

Abstract

In this study, a robust gender prediction system is proposed to fuse global and regional facial representations through score and feature level fusion. In order to extract facial features for gender classification, Binarized Statistical Image Features (BSIF) approach is applied on holistic and regional features of face images. The extracted features are then concatenated to combine the region-based information at feature level fusion. Then the optimized sub-set of features is selected using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method. Finally, the holistic and regional features are combined at score level fusion to produce the final set of scores for gender classification. This study applies Weighted Sum (WS) rule strategy for score level fusion. The experimental results are performed on Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge (MBGC) and CASIA-Iris-Distance databases with consideration of subject-disjoint training and testing evaluation to testify the validity of the proposed gender classification system. The experimental results of the study demonstrate the success of the proposed scheme for gender prediction.