Abstract
Gender recognition using facial images plays an important role in biometric technology. Multiscale texture descriptors perform better in gender recognition because they encode the multiscale facial microstructures in a better way. We present a gender recognition system that uses SVM, two-stage feature selection and multiscale texture feature based on Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform and Weber law descriptor (NSCT-WLD). The proposed system has better recognition rate (99.50%) than the state-of-the-art methods on FERET database. This research also reveals that in NSCT decomposition what is essential for face recognition and what is important for other tasks like age detection.