On the Complementarity of Face Parts for Gender Recognition

Abstract

This paper evaluates the expected complementarity between the most prominent parts of the face for the gender recognition task. Given the image of a face, five important parts (right and left eyes, nose, mouth and chin) are extracted and represented as appearance-based data vectors. In addition, the full face and its internal rectangular region (excluding hair, ears and contour) are also coded. Several mixtures of classifiers based on (subsets of) these five single parts were designed using simple voting, weighted voting and other learner as combiners. Experiments using the FERET database prove that ensembles perform significantly better than plain classifiers based on single parts (as expected).