A hybrid technique for gender classification with SLBP and HOG features

Gender classification from facial images plays a significant role in biometric technology viz. gender medicine, surveillance, electronic banking system and human computer interaction. However, it has many challenges due to variations of pose, expression, aging, race, make-up, occlusion and illumination. In the proposed system, spatially enhanced local binary pattern (SLBP) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) are extracted to classify the human gender with SVM classifier. This hybrid feature selection has increased the power of the proposed system due to its representation of texture micro-patterns and local shape by capturing the edge or gradient structure form the image. The gender classification accuracy is studied by using the local feature representation of the face images separately and also these features are concatenated to provide a better recognition rate. The combination of two different local descriptors provides good representation of face image and this is given to SVM classifier which classifies as male or female. Also, the proposed work is compared with other two traditional classifiers such as k-nearest neighbor and sparse representation classifier. The performance was evaluated on FERET and LFW database. The highest classification accuracy 99.1% is achieved on FERET database and 95.7% is achieved on LFW database by applying cubic SVM with fusion of SLBP and HOG features.