Soft Biometric: Give Me Your Favorite Images and I Will Tell Your Gender

Gender estimation for security and forensic purposes is not a trivial task. Recently, researchers provided methods for predicting gender based on face-images, fingerprint ridge density, body shape, voice and gait. No research to date have been concerned with using one's image aesthetic preferences for predicting gender. Cognitively and psychologically, males and females have different visual aesthetic preferences. This paper is a proof of concept that it is possible to use image's perceptual aesthetic features to identify the gender of a person. This article identifies a bag of image aesthetic features and selects a number of most differentiating features using filter and wrapping selection methods. To improve the classification accuracy, weighted combination of decisions obtained by the conventional binary classifiers is used. The final decision is made based on the fusion of probabilities generated by the mixture of classifiers. The prediction model is trained and tested on a database consisting of 24000 images from 120 Flickr users. Experiment shows that a proper weight assignments allows to obtain 77% accuracy in gender prediction based on aesthetics alone.