On the use of skin texture features for gender recognition: An experimental evaluation

Skin appearance is almost universally the object of gender-related expectations and stereotypes. This not with standing, remarkably little work has been done on establishing quantitatively whether skin texture can be used for gender discrimination. We present a detailed analysis of the skin texture of 43 subjects based on two complementary imaging modalities afforded by a visible-light dermoscope and the recently developed Epsilon sensor for capacitive imaging. We consider an array of established texture features in combination with two supervised classification techniques (1-NN and SVM) and a state-of-the-art unsupervised approach (t-SNE). A statistical analysis of the results suggests that skin microtexture carries very little information on gender.