An exploration of gender identification using only the periocular region

The periocular region, the region of the face surrounding the eyes, has gained increasing attention in biometrics in recent years. This region of the face is of particular interest when trying to identify a person whose face is partially occluded. We propose the novel idea of applying the information obtained from the periocular region to identify the gender of a person, which is a type of soft biométrie recognition. We gradually narrow the region of interest of the face to explore the feasibility of using smaller, eye-centered regions for building a robust gender classifier around the periocular region alone. Our experimental results show that at least an 85% classification rate is still obtainable using only the periocular region with a database of 936 low resolution images collected from the web.