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.
Previous researchers have explored various approaches for predicting the gender of a person based on the features of the iris texture. This paper is the first to predict gender directly from the same binary iris code that could be used for recognition. We found that the information for gender prediction is distributed across the iris, rather than localized in particular concentric bands. We also found that using selected features representing a subset of the iris region achieves better accuracy than using features representing the whole iris region. We used the measures of mutual information to guide the selection of bits from the iris code to use as features in gender prediction. Using this approach, with a person-disjoint training and testing evaluation, we were able to achieve 89 correct gender prediction using the fusion of the best features of iris code from the left and right eyes.