Biologically significant facial landmarks: How significant are they for gender classification?

Automatic gender classification has many applications in human computer interaction. However, to determine the gender of an unseen face is challenging because of the diversity and variations in the human face. In this paper, we explore the importance of biologically significant facial landmarks for gender classification and propose a fully automatic gender classification algorithm. We extract 3D Euclidean and Geodesic distances between these landmarks and use feature selection to determine the relative importance of the biological landmarks for classifying gender. Unlike existing techniques, our algorithm is fully automatic since all landmarks are automatically detected. Experiments on one of the largest 3D face databases FRGC v2 show that our algorithm outperforms all existing techniques by a significant margin.