A Survey of facial gender classification

Abstract

Gender is the most critical demographic attribute of human beings. Gender classification from facial images is widely used in computer vision for surveillance, a straightforward task for humans, and a challenging task for machines. This paper provides a study of facial gender classification in the field of computer vision. We highlight the challenges faced during the image capturing process due to factors such as illumination, angle, occlusion, and expressions. We also review various feature extraction approaches used by previous researchers to perform the facial gender classification task. This paper also compares the performances of previous methods on various face datasets to perform gender classification. We observed from the previous studies that good performance had been achieved for a dataset of facial images taken in a controlled environment. However, much more work needs to be done to increase the accuracy and robustness of facial gender classification, especially in uncontrolled environments.