Gender classification with support vector machines

Support vector machines (SVM) are investigated for visual gender classification with low-resolution "thumbnail" faces (21-by-12 pixels) processed from 1755 images from the FERET face database. The performance of SVM (3.4% error) is shown to be superior to traditional pattern classifiers (linear, quadratic, Fisher linear discriminant, nearest-neighbor) as well as more modern techniques such as radial basis function (RBF) classifiers and large ensemble-RBF networks. SVM also out-performed human test subjects at the same task: in a perception study with 30 human test subjects, ranging in age from mid-20s to mid-40s, the average error rate was found to be 32% for the "thumbnails" and 6.7% with higher resolution images. The difference in performance between low- and high-resolution tests with SVM was only 1%, demonstrating robustness and relative scale invariance for visual classification.