Developing a gender classification approach in human face images using modified local binary patterns and tani-moto based nearest neighbor algorithm

Human identification is a much attention problem in computer vision. Gender classification plays an important role in human identification as preprocess step. So far, various methods have been proposed to solve this problem. Absolutely, classification accuracy is the main challenge for researchers in gender classification. But, some challenges such as rotation, gray scale variations, pose, illumination changes may be occurred in smart phone image capturing. In this respect, a multi step approach is proposed in this paper to classify genders in human face images based on improved local binary patters (MLBP). LBP is a texture descriptor, which extract local contrast and local spatial structure information. Some issues such as noise sensitivity, rotation sensitivity and low discriminative features can be considered as disadvantages of the basic LBP. MLBP handle disadvantages using a new theory to categorize extracted binary patterns of basic LBP. The proposed approach includes two stages. First of all, a feature vector is extracted for human face images based on MLBP. Next, non linear classifiers can be used to classify gender. In this paper nearest neighborhood classifier is evaluated based on Tani-Moto metric as distance measure. In the result part, two databases, self-collected and ICPR are used as human face database. Results are compared by some state-ofthe-art algorithms in this literature that shows the high quality of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy rate. Some of other main advantages of the proposed approach are rotation invariant, low noise sensitivity, size invariant and low computational complexity. The proposed approach decreases the computational complexity of smartphone applications because of reducing the number of database comparisons. It can also improve performance of the synchronous applications in the smarphones because of memory and CPU usage reduction.