Feature Extraction Using Observer Gaze Distributions for Gender Recognition

We determine and use the gaze distribution of observers viewing images of subjects for gender recognition. In general, people look at informative regions when determining the gender of subjects in images. Based on this observation, we hypothesize that the regions corresponding to the concentration of the observer gaze distributions contain discriminative features for gender recognition. We generate the gaze distribution from observers while they perform the task of manually recognizing gender from subject images. Next, our gaze-guided feature extraction assigns high weights to the regions corresponding to clusters in the gaze distribution, thereby selecting discriminative features. Experimental results show that the observers mainly focused on the head region, not the entire body. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the gaze-guided feature extraction significantly improves the accuracy of gender recognition.