Facial gender recognition using multiple sources of visual information

In this article we present a novel multimodal gender recognition system, which successfully integrates the head and mouth motion information with facial appearance by taking advantage of a unified probabilistic framework. In fact, we develop a temporal subsystem that has an extended feature space consisting of parameters related to head and mouth motion; at the same time, we introduce a complementary spatial subsystem based on a probabilistic extension of the eigenface approach. In the end, we implement an integration step to combine the similarity scores of the two parallel subsystems, using a suitable opinion fusion (or score fusion) strategy. The experiments show that not only facial appearance but also head and mouth motion possess a potentially relevant discriminatory power, and that the integration of different sources of biometric information from video sequences is the key strategy to develop more accurate and reliable recognition systems.