A gender recognition system from facial images using SURF based BoW method

Gender recognition from facial images has become one of challenging research problem in computer vision, security, verbal-nonverbal communication and human computer interaction applications nowadays. Because facial images include many information such as gender, facial expressions, age, ethnic origin in computer-aided applications, the success rate of the gender recognition depends on quality of facial images. In this paper, it is proposed a new gender recognition method combining Speed Up Robust Features (SURF) based Bags of Visual Words (BoW) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm unlike previous work. The method is tested on realistic frontal, left and right face images from modern gender recognition FERET dataset with 3560 samples to see efficiency of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain better gender recognition performance on FERET database and the accuracy level of on left and right face images is a bit lower than the average accuracy level of frontal ones.