Real-Time Gender Detection in the Wild Using Deep Neural Networks

Gender recognition can be used in many applications, such as video surveillance, human-computer interaction and customized advertisement. Current state-of-the-art gender recognition methods are detector-dependent or region-dependent, focusing mostly on facial features (a face detector is typically required). These limitations do not allow an end-to-end training pipeline, and many features used in the detection phase must be re-learned in the classification step. Furthermore, the use of facial features limits the application of such methods in the wild, where the face might not be present. This paper presents a real-time end-to-end gender detector based on deep neural networks. The proposed method detects and recognizes the gender of persons in the wild, meaning in images with a high variability in pose, illumination an occlusions. To train and evaluate the results a new annotation set of Pascal VOC 2007 and CelebA were created. Our experimental results indicate that combining both datasets during training can increase the mAp of our gender detector. We also visually analyze which parts leads our network to make mistakes and the bias introduced by the training data.