Recent research has explored the possibility of automatically deducing information such as gender, age and race of an individual from their biometric data. While the face modality has been extensively studied in this regard, the iris modality less so. In this paper, we first review the medical literature to establish a biological basis for extracting gender and race cues from the iris. Then, we demonstrate that it is possible to use simple texture descriptors, like BSIF (Binarized Statistical Image Feature) and LBP (Local Binary Patterns), to extract gender and race attributes from an NIR ocular image used in a typical iris recognition system. The proposed method predicts gender and race from a single eye image with an accuracy of 86 and 90 , respectively. In addition, the following analysis are conducted: (a) the role of different parts of the ocular region on attribute prediction; (b) the influence of gender on race prediction, and vice-versa; (c) the impact of eye color on gender and race prediction; (d) the impact of image blur on gender and race prediction; (e) the generalizability of the method across different datasets; and (f) the consistency of prediction performance across the left and right eyes.
To the best of our knowledge, Lagree and Bowyer @cite_20 were the first to look at the impact of gender on race prediction. Race was predicted by training and testing on images from only female subjects, as well as images from only male subjects. They were able to achieve an 82.8
@cite_20
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Previous researchers have reported success in predicting ethnicity and in predicting gender from features of the iris texture. This paper is the first to consider both problems using similar experimental approaches. Contributions of this work include greater accuracy than previous work on predicting ethnicity from iris texture, empirical evidence that suggests that gender prediction is harder than ethnicity prediction, and empirical evidence that ethnicity prediction is more difficult for females than for males.