Gender Recognition from Face Images with Dyadic Wavelet Transform and Local Binary Pattern

Ihsan Ullah, Muhammad Hussain, Hatim Aboalsamh, Muhammad Ghulam, Anwar M. Mirza, George Bebis

Abstract: Gender recognition from facial images plays an important role in biometric applications. We investigated Dyadic wavelet Transform (DyWT) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) for gender recognition in this paper. DyWT is a multi-scale image transformation technique that decomposes an image into a number of subbands which separate the features at different scales. On the other hand, LBP is a texture descriptor and represents the local information in a better way. Also, DyWT is a kind of translation invariant wavelet transform that has better potential for detection than DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform). Employing both DyWT and LBP, we propose a new technique of face representation that performs better for gender recognition. DyWT is based on spline wavelets, we investigated a number of spline wavelets for finding the best spline wavelets for gender recognition. Through a large number of experiments performed on FERET database, we report the best combination of parameters for DyWT and LBP that results in maximum accuracy. The proposed system outperforms the stat-of-the-art gender recognition approaches; it achieves a recognition rate of 99.25% on FERET database.