Automatic Gender Classification through Face Segmentation

Automatic gender classification is challenging due to large variations of face images, particularly in the un-constrained scenarios. In this paper, we propose a framework which first segments a face image into face parts, and then performs automatic gender classification. We trained a Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) based segmentation model through manually labeled face images. The CRFs based model is used to segment a face image into six different classes-mouth, hair, eyes, nose, skin, and back. The probabilistic classification strategy (PCS) is used, and probability maps are created for all six classes. We use the probability maps as gender descriptors and trained a Random Decision Forest (RDF) classifier, which classifies the face images as either male or female. The performance of the proposed framework is assessed on four publicly available datasets, namely Adience, LFW, FERET, and FEI, with results outperforming state-of-the-art (SOA).