On the use of skin texture features for gender recognition: an experimental evaluation

Bianconi, F. Smeraldi, M. Abdollahyan and P. Xiao, in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA), 2016, to appear

Abstract:

Skin appearance is almost universally the object of gender–related expectations and stereotypes. This notwithstanding, remarkably little work has been done on establishing quantitatively whether skin texture can be used for gender discrimination. We present a detailed analysis of the skin texture of 43 subjects based on two complementary imaging modalities afforded by a visible-light dermoscope and the recently developed Epsilon sensor for capacitive imaging. We consider an array of established texture features in combination with two supervised classification techniques (1-NN and SVM) and a state-of-the-art unsupervised approach (t-SNE). A statistical analysis of the results suggests that skin microtexture carries very little information on gender.

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