Gender Classification Using Interlaced Derivative Patterns

Automated gender recognition has become an interesting and challenging research problem in recent years with its potential applications in security industry and human-computer interaction systems. In this paper we present a novel feature representation, namely Interlaced Derivative Patterns (IDP), which is a derivative-based technique to extract discriminative facial features for gender classification. The proposed technique operates on a neighborhood around a pixel and concatenates the extracted regional feature distributions to form a feature vector. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the IDP method for gender classification, showing that the proposed approach achieves 29.6% relative error reduction compared to Local Binary Patterns (LBP), while it performs over four times faster than Local Derivative Patterns (LDP).