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.
With periocular biometrics gaining attention recently, the goal of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of local appearance features extracted from the periocular region images for soft biometrie classification. We extract gender and ethnicity information from the periocular region images using grayscale pixel intensities and periocular texture computed by Local Binary Patterns as our features and a SVM classifier. Results are presented on the visible spectrum periocular images obtained from the FRGC face dataset. For 4232 periocular images of 404 subjects, we obtain a baseline gender and ethnicity classification accuracy of 93 and 91 , respectively, using 5-fold cross validation. Furthermore, we show that fusion of the soft biometrie information obtained from our classification approach with the texture based periocular recognition approach results in an overall performance improvement. Gender classification from multispectral periocular and iris images is a new topic on soft-biometric research. The feature extracted from RGB images and Near Infrared Images shows complementary information independent of the spectrum of the images. This paper shows that we canfusion these information improving the accuracy of gender classification. Most gender classification methods reported in the literature has used images from face databases and all the features for classification purposes. Experimental results suggest: (a) Features extracted in different scales can perform better than using only one feature in a single scale; (b) The periocular images performed better than iris images on VIS and NIR; c) The fusion of features on different spectral images NIR and VIS allows improve the accuracy; (c) The feature selection applied to NIR and VIS allows select relevant features and d) Our accuracy 90 is competitive with the state of the art. The periocular region, the region of the face surrounding the eyes, has gained increasing attention in biometrics in recent years. This region of the face is of particular interest when trying to identify a person whose face is partially occluded. We propose the novel idea of applying the information obtained from the periocular region to identify the gender of a person, which is a type of soft biometrie recognition. We gradually narrow the region of interest of the face to explore the feasibility of using smaller, eye-centered regions for building a robust gender classifier around the periocular region alone. Our experimental results show that at least an 85 classification rate is still obtainable using only the periocular region with a database of 936 low resolution images collected from the web. Gender is an important demographic attribute. Automated gender estimation has drawn significant interest in numerous applications such as surveillance, human-computer interaction, anonymous customized advertisement systems, image retrieval system as well as in fusion with primary biometric trait to improve the matching accuracy of a biometric system. Although studies have been proposed for gender estimation from face, fingerprint and iris images, none of the existing studies explore gender prediction from ocular images captured in mobile environment, which is the aim of this paper. We evaluate several textural descriptors in combination with Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) on a large scale publicly available VISOB dataset captured using mobile devices. The best accuracy of 91.6 is obtained using Histogram of Gradient (HOG) descriptor in combination with MLP classifier.