Gender Classification with Support Vector Machines

  • Authors:
  • Baback Moghaddam;Ming-Hsuan Yang

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • FG '00 Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2000
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are investigated for visual gender classification with low resolution ``thumbnail'' faces (21-by-12 pixels) processed from 1,755 images from the FERET face database. The performance of SVMs (3.4% error) is shown to be superior to traditional pattern classifiers (Linear, Quadratic, Fisher Linear Discriminant, Nearest-Neighbor) as well as more modern techniques such as Radial Basis Function (RBF) classifiers and large ensemble-RBF networks. SVMs also out-performed human test subjects at the same task: in a perception study with 30 human test subjects, ranging in age from mid-20s to mid-40s, the average error rate was found to be 32% for the ``thumbnails'' and 6.7% with higher resolution images. The difference in performance between low and high resolution tests with SVMs was only 1%, demonstrating robustness and relative scale invariance for visual classification.