IEEE - 43488
A Robust Approach for Gender Recognition using
Deep Learning
Shefali Arora
Division of Computer Engineering
Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology
Delhi,India
arorashef@gmail.com
Abstract— Gender information using facial patterns serves an
important use in various user interaction applications. This
paper proposes an approach based on Convolutional Neural
Networks to identify gender from faces. The network is trained
using back-propagation and Adam optimization. Using
convolution operations, performance of proposed CNN network
is evaluated on publicly available CASIA face recognition
dataset. The proposed network is able to process 640 x 480 pixel
face images in a very less time. A combination of convolutional
and max pooling layers is used and classification accuracy of
98.5 percent is achieved in just 50 epochs. The results on CASIA
benchmark prove that a superior classification performance can
be attained by using Convolutional Neural Networks for gender
recognition. The accuracy attained is more than earlier methods
used for face recognition.
Keywords— facial patterns, gender, CNN, deep
learning,computer vision
I. INTRODUCTION
Facial images help a great deal in terms of information
needed for various applications involving human interaction.
Computer vision researchers have been working on
development of systems that make use of this reliability of
human systems. In this paper, gender classification from facial
images is the main focus.
Research shows that the differences between masculinity
and femininity can help to improve performances of biometric
systems and computer vision applications. There are various
challenges like deciphering facial expressions, removing
background noise etc. that have to be dealt with in this
process. Thus there arises a need of developing robust
algorithms that can achieve gender classification with high
accuracy.
Conventional approaches of face recognition involve
image preprocessing, feature extraction and further
classification. Thus performance is highly dependent on the
type of classifier used and the number of features extracted.
The advantage of using CNNs is that these multilayer
perceptrons achieve feature extraction, dimensionality
reduction and classification, all in one network[1]. This is
done by using convolutional layers, max pooling layers and
9th ICCCNT 2018
July 10-12, 2018, IISC, Bengaluru
Bengaluru, India
M.P.S Bhatia
Division of Computer Engineering
Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology
Delhi,India
bhatia.mps@gmail.com
finally fully connected layers. Thus accuracy is improved to a
large extent , with the use of CNN for facial recognition and
analysis.CNNs are easier to train as compared to traditional
classifiers. Also they have fewer parameters than fully
connected multi layer perceptron networks and are robust to
shape and transformation variations[2].
In this paper, we propose a robust and effective method to
classify gender using CNN. The network architecture has
lesser number of layers and parameters as compared to
existing methods. We conduct experiments on 2500 images of
CASIA face recognition dataset, along with image
augmentation to provide a good amount of training data to the
network. It is observed that by using Adam optimization and
backpropagation, the training accuracy converges in lesser
number of epochs and outperforms various existing methods
used in gender recognition from facial patterns.
The remaining paper is classified as follows. Section 2
describes the earlier work done in the field of face recognition
and deep learning. Section 3 explains the architecture of
convolutional neural networks and the proposed use of this
architecture in our gender recognition system. Section 4
provides the experimental results and Section 5 concludes the
paper.
II. RELATED WORK
Authors worked on unconstrained face images for gender
recognition in LFW dataset, based on prior knowledge of pose
and demographic parameters[3], attaining an accuracy of
around 90% using PHOG descriptor and SVM. Other
descriptors like Gabor descriptors were used along with Fuzzy
LDA classifier which considers facial images to be in more
than one class[4].
Gonzalez-Sosa et al.[5] worked on estimation of gender ,
ethnicity, age and presence of glasses from faces in LFW
dataset, to tackle facial recognition in unconstrained
environments. The accuracy attained was 98.2%.
Levi and Tassner developed a convolutional net architecture
which proved appropriate for age and gender recognition on
Adience benchmark[6]. Gender estimation using this method
gave a mean accuracy of 84.6%. Authors have worked on
different architectures of CNN, training strategies and their
 IEEE - 43488

application on three popular benchmarks to solve the problem In this paper, we have been able to solve the task of gender
of gender classification[9]. recognition by using deep convolutional networks, which help
Shan worked on LFW benchmark using local binary patterns to attain high accuracy, with results being better than many
and SVM classifier to achieve an accuracy of 94.81%[10]. existing approaches. The proposed architecture using deep
Interests in CNNs for facial recognition was revived and convolutional networks has been described in the following
authors continued to work on deeper layers of Convolutional section.
neural networks .
Mirjalili and Ross[11] devised techniques in which facial
images were modified and then soft biometric utilities like III. DEEP CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORKS
gender were mined. While gender classified gives a result
which is perturbed, face matcher retains its utility. A. Convolutional Neural Networks
Many such experiments were conducting by modifying Convolutional neural networks make use of convolution to
existing images to attain information of soft biometric traits extract various features from the input[14]. It makes use of
like age and gender . Another experiment on the FERET filters for the process of convolution, in which various features
database gave a classification rate of 94.7 %, with the help of of the image would be extracted. Given a filter of size k x k,
CNN. The use of FERET benchmark has been used in various an image of size n x n is convolved with each filter to give k
research works in a controlled environment as it was easier to features. Thus, the output image would be of size (n-k+1) x (n-
use them as compared to other datasets with faces in the k +1). The filters start from top right corner and move
wild[12]. Other datasets like ImageNet have been used [13] downward, then left to right to perform convolution.
for the problem of gender recognition using deep
convolutional neural networks.The problem of overfitting has
to be taken care of while using CNNs due to a huge number of
model parameters.
Authors obtained a record accuracy of 97.31% on LFW
dataset by using minimalistic CNN and 10 times lesser
number of training images[14].
The use of local binary patterns was done along with the use
AdaBoost classifier on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW )
dataset by authors in [15] . This is a challenging dataset and so
a robust system was required to identify faces in unconstrained
environments. Coco et al.[16] worked on use of DNN for Fig.1. Convolution applied to layers
recognition of gender and how using a lower cardinality of
training examples can bias the performance of the system. These layers are followed by pooling layers which reduce the
An approach for gender classification using single neural resolution of features. The most generally used method of
network was given by Titive and Bouzerdoum [20] in which pooling is Max pooling, which subsamples a given image by
an average classification accuracy of 97% was achieved. Afifi picking the maximum values from a matrix[15].
[21] has worked on solving gender recognition task using a
large dataset of hands, as they give important gender related
information.
Biometric identification is playing a major role in ensuring
security and privacy of individuals in many applications these
days.Various traits like face, fingerprint and iris are used to
identify a person. In applications using facial recognition, a
single image can give us valuable information like gender,age,
ethnicity etc. The gender recognition task is very important as
well as challenging .Faces may not be identified due to
differences in pose, illumination and expressions. It is possible
that a biometric system might misidentify an individual in
high risk environments. Making use of soft biometrics ( which
includes attributes like age, gender etc.) can help to obtain Fig.2. Results after Max pooling
valuable information about an individual and solve
identification problems. Besides solving problems like The use of non linear functions helps in distinct identification
shadowing and lighting, use of gender recognition can also be of likely features in each layer. The most commonly used non
used in video surveillance where faces are detected at a linear function is ReLu, or rectified linear unit, which is given
distance, without personal cooperation. Thus, a lot of accuracy by the function[19]:
and therefore, robust algorithms are required in dealing with Y=max(0,x) (1)
such challenging problems.

9th ICCCNT 2018

July 10-12, 2018, IISC, Bengaluru
Bengaluru, India
 IEEE - 43488

There are 10 convolution layers and max pooling layers

followed by a fully connected later and dropout layer. The size
of filters used in each layer is 5 x 5.

The convolution layers are:

Fig.3. Graph depicting ReLu function
1.Convolutional filters of size 5 x 5 are convolved with no
stride and padding, resulting in a reduced volume size of
image. The number of filters are 32 in number. This is
followed by rectified linear unit function and maxpooling
which reduces the size to further and removes any negative
values if present in the image matrix.

This function removes any negative values from the output
and makes sure that input and output layer sizes are the same.
It trains the network faster than other non linear functions like
tangent, sigmoid etc. The fully connected layers of CNN sum
weights of the previous layers and decide a final result by
involving previous layers to get an output feature.
2. This layer is followed by 2 convolutional layers with filters
of size 5 x 5 which would extract features from the image of
the previous layers. 64 filters are used. Every layer is fused
with max pooling layers and the activation function used in
ReLu i.e rectified linear unit, as it is better option as compared
to other activation functions.

Fig.4. Fully connected layer
3. The output image from the previous layers is fed to the next
two convolutional layers using same size filter, 128 in number.
This is followed by another four layers, 256 convolving filters
of size 5, and 512 convolving filters of size 5.
A fully connected layer is used at the end of this network with
a dropout factor of 0.8. The fully connected layer uses a
softmax layer . The use of dropout helps to reduce the case of
overfitting, which is quite common in case of convolutional
neural networks. The softmax layer helps to find the
probability with which each image falls in a particular class:
i.e whether the person is a male or female.

B. Proposed architecture C. CASIA benchmark

The CASIA Face Image Database version 5.0 (or CASIA-Face
The network architecture has been proposed so as to avoid V5) consists of 2500 facial images of 500 people.These faces
overfitting. The model used in the experiment is as follows: have been captured using Logitech Cmera. The people
TABLE I. PARAMETERS FOR GENDER RECOGNITION involved are mostly students, waiters,workers etc.

Height of the image 640

Width of the image 480
Number of training images 1500
Number of validation images 1000
Number of epochs 50
Optimizer Adam
Loss Categorical crossentropy
Augmentation parameters Flip left, right

The images input to the network is are of dimension 640 x

480 x1 (where 1 is the number of color channels). The colored
images have been resized and converted into grayscale
images.

9th ICCCNT 2018

July 10-12, 2018, IISC, Bengaluru
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 IEEE - 43488

D. Training and testing

The dataset is split into training and cross validation sets.
This is because it is possible that that if we shuffle the training
set and directly go for testing, the results would be too
promising as compared to reality. Therefore, the hypothesis
cannot be generalized. Therefore, cross validation is done on a
fixed set of images.
The network is trained using the available images and target
labels which are binary vectors for classification of males and
females. There are two classes; hence the number of target
Fig.5. Images from CASIA dataset
vectors are 2 in this case.
In addition, the network is trained to avoid overfitting by
The database consists of images in BMP format and the
applying a dropout layer with a dropout ratio of 0.8. Further,
resolution of these images is 640 x 480. These images could
the weights are optimized by using Adam optimization and a
also be used for various intra-class variations like pose,
learning rate of 0.001. Image augmentation is used by flipping
illumination, distance etc.
the images left and right, as CNNs work best if more training
In this paper, we have opted for the cropped version of
data is fed to the network.
images. These images have been converted to grayscale using
The image augmentation used is a just-in-time one and
OpenCv. While 1500 images of the available 2500 images
although it leads to increase in time taken per epoch for
have been considered to be a part of the training set, the
training, it helps to reduce the overhead incurred for storage.
remaining 1000 are a part of the validation set. Once the
The parameters for augmentation of images are dependent on
model is trained and validated, we can test it by feeding any
the dataset used and can be applied based on intuition. The
new image and it would accurately classify whether the input
results are highly dependent on the selection and tuning of
face image is of a male or a female. Thus gender classification
parameters of CNN model.
has been done on CASIA benchmark.
1 epoch = (Number of training images/ Batch size) iterations
The figure ahead illustrates the network architecture of
The use of proper weights initialization helps to increase the
Convolutional layers used to estimate gender of a person.
performance. The number of epochs in which training
converges is 50, which is much better as compared to existing
methods.
E. Dataset Preprocessing and Tools used

The images from CASIA dataset are preprocessed using an

automated Python script to divide it into two categories: male
and female. The platform used to further analyze the dataset
and predict gender for test images are:

● OpenCV
● Python 3.3
● Tensorflow (tflearn)
● Platform : Virtual Machine on Google Cloud with 30 GB
RAM
● Visualization: Accuracy and loss of the model have been
visualized using Tensorboard.

OpenCV is a popular library used these days for applications

in the field of computer vision and machine learning. With the
help of various functions available in OpenCV, various
operations on images can be performed like reading, resizing,
displaying etc.
Fig.6. Proposed architecture

F. Adam Optimization

9th ICCCNT 2018

July 10-12, 2018, IISC, Bengaluru
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 IEEE - 43488
Adam optimization is an extension of classical Stochastic
Gradient descent algorithm . It is used by various researchers
because :
. It requires very little hyperparameter tuning
. It is computationally very efficient
. It can work on noisy data
. It combines the advantages of AdaGrad and RMSProp
algorithm in which a per parameter learning rate is used and
this further helps in improvement of performance.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The accuracy achieved on CASIA benchmark using the
proposed model is 98.5 percent.
Fig.7. Accuracy on training set
Fig.8. Accuracy on validation set
9th ICCCNT 2018
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Fig.9. Loss using Adam optimization
These graphs, visualized using Tensorboard, depict the
accuracy attained and the loss incurred while training the
model. The loss has been calculated by using categorical
crossentropy in each epoch.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we have worked on the gender classification
problem by considering 2500 faces present in the CASIA
benchmark. Using image augmentation and other techniques,
we have been able to achieve a good amount of accuracy i.e.
98.5 percent on a lesser number of training images. The
number of epochs in which training converges is also lesser.
Our results are better as compared to many of the existing
models for gender recognition.
The paper illustrates the use of Convolutional Neural
Networks and the importance of a deep network and
hyperparameters to attain a better classification performance
on our dataset. Thus our algorithm proves to be quite robust in
handling this problem.
As a part of the future work, we would be extending the use of
CNNs to recognition of other biometric traits like fingerprint,
iris, palm etc. We would also work on other techniques that
could help to make our deep CNN network attain even better
accuracy. This includes the selection and tuning of
hyperparameters, batch normalization and other methods
which could help to attain our objective.
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9th ICCCNT 2018

July 10-12, 2018, IISC, Bengaluru
Bengaluru, India