Gender recognition from body

This paper studies the problem of recognizing gender from full body images. This problem has not been addressed before, partly because of the variant nature of human bodies and clothing that can bring tough difficulties. However, gender recognition has high application potentials, e.g., security surveillance and customer statistics collection in restaurants, supermarkets, and even building entrances. In this paper, we build a system of recognizing gender from full body images, taken from frontal or back views. Our contributions are three-fold. First, to handle the variety of human body characteristics, we represent each image by a collection of patch features, which model different body parts and provide a set of clues for gender recognition. To combine the clues, we build an ensemble learning algorithm from those body parts to recognize gender from fixed view body images (frontal or back). Second, we relax the fixed view constraint and show the possibility to train a flexible classifier for mixed view images with the almost same accuracy as the fixed view case. At last, our approach is shown to be robust to small alignment errors, which is preferred in many applications.