Can a Smile Reveal Your Gender?

Automated gender estimation has numerous applications including video surveillance, human computer-interaction, anonymous customized advertisement and image retrieval. Most commonly, the underlying algorithms analyze facial appearance for clues of gender. In this work, we propose a novel approach for gender estimation, based on facial behavior in video-sequences capturing smiling subjects. The proposed behavioral approach quantifies gender dimorphism of facial smiling-behavior and is instrumental in cases of (a) omitted appearance-information e.g. low resolution due to poor acquisition), (b) gender spoofing e.g. makeup-based face alteration), as well as can be utilized to (c) improve the performance of appearance-based algorithms, since it provides complementary information. The proposed algorithm extracts spatio-temporal features based on dense trajectories, represented by a set of descriptors encoded by Fisher Vectors. Our results suggest that smile-based features include significant gender-clues. The designed algorithm obtains true gender classification rates of 86.3% for adolescents, significantly outperforming two state-of-the-art appearance-based algorithms (OpenBR and how-old.net), while for adults we obtain true gender classification rates of 91.01%, which is comparably discriminative to the better of these appearance-based algorithms.