Gender Detection and Classification from
Fingerprints Using Pixel Count
ANJU NARAYANAN
M. Tech Scholar
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
Government College of Engineering Kannur Government College of Engineering Kannur
anjunarayanan41@gmail.com
Abstract—In this modern world of technology, gender
classification have immense value. Gender detection from the
fingerprint helps to catalogue the data and to analyze it easily.
Now a days gender detection based on fingerprint can be seen
in industrial, commercial and unique id of nation as AADHAR
card. Today, world’s judicial system accepted Fingerprint
based recognition of an individual and it is the most adopted
technique. So in this work we tried to implement a system to
detect the gender of the particular fingerprint. In this proposed
system, time domain approach is used to find out the gender
of a particular fingerprint obtained using systematic pixel
counting. The results showed that the gender identification using
systematic pixel counting have 90.2% classification accuracy for
females and 96.4% for males. The algorithm can be developed
using Python framework 3.6.
keywords: Human Fingerprints, ridge count, valley area,
threshold, gender Classification
I. INTRODUCTION
The word bio metrics means life measurement. There are
different biometric technologies are there, which reveals the
identity of the particular individual. Fingerprint, iris, facial
and voice based recognition etc are some of them. Among
the different technologies, fingerprints are considered as one
of the most important, mature bio metric technologies [1].
Human finger tip possess some alignments called ridges and
valleys which together form a unique pattern.The black pixels
in fingerprint image are ridges and valleys are the white
pixels. Fingerprints are fully developed at nine months of fetus
development and fingerprint patterns are unique in nature,
do not vary during the entire course of life time of human
beings. Some times, because of some accidents or burns on
the human fingertips which lead to reduction in quality index
of fingerprint image. But after recovering from all these,
fingerprint patterns will be restored. The unique behaviour of
a fingerprint is due to the overall alignment of ridges and
valleys [3]. Different Studies are carried out for checking the
effectiveness of fingerprint based age and gender detection
based on the parameters such as ridge count, ridge density,
ridge thickness to valley thickness ratio, ridge width and
patterns of the fingerprint.
From other state of arts, it is found that fingerprint have
some properties which reveal the gender of paricular individ-
ual. Anil K. Jain et al. [4] proposed an approach for fingerprint
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Sajith K
Professor
sajithk@gcek.ac.in
matching for fingerprint recognition system which consists
of both verification and identification. In this work minutiae
points are used to differentiate the users. A system for gender
detection based on finger ridge count within a distinct region
of Southern India proposed by Nithin et al. [5]. By using
total of 550 fingerprint images from both female and male
class, the results proved that female have greater ridge count
than male fingerprint. A system for gender detection within
a distinct region of Southern India based on ridge count of
the fingerprint proposed by Nithin et al. [5]. By using total
of 550 fingerprint images from both female and male class,
the results proved that females posses larger ridge count than
male fingerprint. In their work they proved that, a fingerprint
having ridge density less than 13 ridges per 25mm2 is more
similar to that of male fingerprint and a fingerprint having
a ridge count greater than 14 ridges per 25mm2 is more
similar to that of female fingerprint. Another work proposed
by S. F. Abdullah et al. [9], described the use of ridge density
of human fingerprint for the classification of gender among
the human beings from northern part of Malaysia. The study
which consists of 50 fingerprint subjects, which are from 25
females and 25 males and fingerprints are collected by plain
technique. From the results they showed that, if fingerprint
ridges are less than 12 ridges/ 25mm2 , then it will more
likely belong to a male subject and if more than 14 ridges
/ 25mm2 , then it will more likely belong to female subject.
By systematic pixel counting method proposed by Md. Sazzad
Hossain et al. [11] it is found that there is a considerable
difference in pixel ratio for male and female subjects. Suchita
Tarare et al. [12] used frequency domain approach method
for gender classification using fingerprint. In this method,
Discrete wavelet transform (dwt) is used to perform fingerprint
classification. The classifier used to test the male and female
fingerprints is K nearest neighbor (knn) classifier.
In this present work, all fingerprint images are collected
from publicly available SOCOFing data set. After acquiring,
we used time domain approach for gender detection from
the particular fingerprint. Additionally, we collected some
latent fingerprints from male and female subjects in order to
check the effectiveness of this approach in the case of latent
fingerprints.
The contributions of this study: Introduced histogram equal-
isation as one of the preprocessing step, Threshold calculation
is done using histogram of pixel ratio obtained for male and
female fingerprint data set, created a latent fingerprint data set
using ink and paper method.
The paper is organised as follows: Section II describes the
methodology used for the experimentation. Section III discuses
results and the paper is concluded in section IV.
Most of the existing models suffer from some limitations,
mainly related to the different feature extraction approaches.
For example, some of the existing methods do not perform
well on low-quality images [3].Other than that, most of the
algorithms relies on parameters that cannot be set as standard
values and may change while considering different databases.
In our work, fingerprints are acquired from publicly avail-
able SOCOFing dataset. After acquisition, we used a system-
atic pixel counting approach for gender detection.
II. METHODOLOGY
Block diagram for the proposed method is shown in Fig.2.
The recommended work has been divided into five sections
namely:
• Fingerprint acquisition
• Preprocessing images
• Extracting features
• Threshold calculation
• Comparison based on threshold
Fig. 1. Block diagram for gender detection using systematic pixel counting.
A. Fingerprint acquisition/ Data collection
Fingerprint images are collected from Sokoto Coventry
Fingerprint Dataset (SOCOFing), which are labelled database
designed for academic research purposes. It consists of 6,000
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real fingerprint images from 600 African subjects. Out of real
6000 fingerprint images 4770 fingerprint images coming under
male subjects and 1230 belongs to female subjects along with
the own created data set for checking the efficiency of the
system.
We created a data set of 200 fingerprint images which are
collected by ink and paper method. Out of 200 fingerprint
images, 100 belongs to male and 100 belongs to female
subjects.
Fig. 2. Fingerprint images from collected data set
Fig. 3. Fingerprint images from SOCOFing data set
B. Image preprocessing
The images of fingerprints which are collected will not
have perfect quality. So some preprocessing techniques have
to perform on the fingerprint images in order to improve the
quality. In our method, we need the count of black pixel
which represent the ridge area and the count of white pixels,
represents the valley area. For obtaining the perfect count
of the pixels, fingerprint image should be enhanced. The
fingerprint enhancement algorithm will increase the clarity of
ridges and valleys.
Histogram equalization was employed in this method. His-
togram equalization is used to increase the perceptional infor-
mation by increasing the value of pixel in an image.
Fig. 4. (a) Original image (b) Histogram equalized image (c) Binarized image
After image enhancement, fingerprint image is transformed
into binary image for calculating the number of black and
white pixels. The black and white pixels represents the ridges
and valleys respectively. So, to count the number of pixels,
convert the gray level image in to binarized image which
comprise 0’s and 1’s only. Locally adaptive Binarization tech-
nique is used for converting the fingerprint image in to binary.
Original image, Histogram equalized image and Binarized
image are shown in Fig.4.
C. Gender Detection by Systematic Pixel Counting
After acquisition of fingerprint data set, preprocessing steps
were done for all images in the database, and check their
perfections manually. We found that some images are not
much clear, some get deformed, and some images are not
fully captured by the scanners (only some fingerprint patterns
patterns were captured). We eliminated images which are not
proper. Among the 6000 images only 2000 were taken, which
consists of 1000 male and 1000 female fingerprint images. We
defined 96X96 pixel as valley area for all 2000 images, where
the center point of the processed image and center point of the
valley area are same. Centre point is actually centroid , which
defines the geometric center of the image. Entire database is
separated in to male and female classes. Finally, we got two
classes, one is with male fingerprint images and other one is
with female fingerprint images.
Fig. 5. Histogram for male pixel ratio.
Fig. 6. Histogram for female pixel ratio.
Fingerprint feature extraction will be the next step. Finger-
prints consists of many different features. In this work, Pixel
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3444032
ratio can be used as a feature. Pixel ratio can be determined by
using these three steps. Initially, we need the count of white
pixels within the valley area and the count of black pixels
within the same area. Finally calculate the ratio between white
pixels and black pixels. Initially, count the number of white
pixels within the valley area. Next, count the number of black
pixels within the same area. Finally calculate the ratio between
white pixels and black pixels.
Final step is the decision making. In this step, We plot the
histogram for the pixel ratio for all male and female subjects.
Histogram of pixel ratio for male and female fingerprint is
shown in Fig.5 and Fig.6. We found an overlapping point over
which male pixel ratio starts to decrease and female pixel ratio
starts to increase. This overlapping point is considered as the
threshold point, Th. After that we will compare the calculated
ratio R with a standard threshold value, Th. Histogram for
the combined pixel ratio for male and female for threshold
calculation is shown in Fig.7. We consider this value of
threshold, because in our analysis we found that, for any value
of R greater than or equal to Th, is more similar to that of
female subject, otherwise the subject is more similar to that of
a male. Based on ridge and valley count, we can also classify
the gender as male and female. From these we obtained that
males posses high ridge count than females.
Fig. 7. Histogram for threshold calculation
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A. Experimental results
TABLE 1 and TABLE 2 show confusion matrix for gender
detection performed on Socofing data set and collected latent
fingerprint data set respectively. From the distribution, we
obtained that the most of the male fingerprint subjects contains
black and white pixels ratio R less than 1.17 which is the
threshold point. Contrarily many female fingerprint subjects
posses R greater than or equal to the threshold point. And
overall accuracy is found to be 93.3% .
 Actual Gender/Estimated
Female Male Accuracy
Gender
Female 902 98 90.2%
Male 36 964 96.4%
TABLE 1. Confusion matrix for gender detection performed on socofing
dataset

Actual Gender/Estimated
Female Male Accuracy
Gender
Female 69 31 69%
Male 22 78 78%
TABLE 2. Confusion matrix for gender detection performed on collected
fingerprint dataset

Fig. 9. Comparison of valley values for male and female.

After performing gender detection in socofing dataset,
methodology is applied to the collected latent fingerprint data
set. Then accuracy is found to be 73.5%. From the result we
found that this method is not much applicable to the case of
latent fingerprints.
Based on the results we obtained, we found that female
fingerprints have more ridges and male fingerprints possess
more valleys which are shown in Fig.8 and Fig.9 respectively.
Fig. 8. Comparison of ridge values for male and female.
IV. C ONCLUSION
From the literature it is observed that a good number of re-
searchers have worked on gender classification using different
approaches and forecasted some promising results with their
own data sets. The results showed that the gender identification
using systematic pixel couting have 95.7%classification accu-
racy for females and 96.4% for males. The overall accuracy
is found to be 93.3%. The proposed system used pixel ratio
as the feature to classify the gender from the fingerprint.
From our work we found that histogram plot can be used
to classify the gender using fingerprint. After observing the
performance of this system, we obtained a conclusion there
was an association between distribution of ridges and valleys
in a fingerprint image and gender of a particular person and we
obtained that male fingerprint possess more valleys and female
fingerprint possess more ridges. We also observed that gender
classification based on the fingerprint is depended on finger
print images qualities, So this method is not much suitable
for latent fingerprints obtained from the crime scene due to
its low quality. And we found that for obtaining better results,
maximum number of images should be taken.

B. Comparison with the existing method: Systematic pixel R EFERENCES

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3444032

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3444032