Abstract
The gender recognition problem has attracted the attention of the computer vision community due to its importance in many applications (e.g., surveillance and human-computer interaction [HCI]). Images of varying levels of illumination, occlusion, and other factors are captured in uncontrolled environ-ments. Iris and facial recognition technology cannot be used on these images because iris texture is unclear in these instances, and faces may be covered by a scarf, hijab, or mask due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The periocular region is a reliable source of information because it features rich discriminative biometric features. However, most existing gender classification approaches have been designed based on hand-engineered features or validated in controlled environ-ments. Motivated by the superior performance of deep learning, we proposed a new method, PeriGender, inspired by the design principles of the ResNet and DenseNet models, that can classify gender using features from the periocular region. The proposed system utilizes a dense concept in a residual model. Through skip connections, it reuses features on different scales to strengthen dis-criminative features. Evaluations of the proposed system on challenging datasets indicated that it outperformed state-of-the-art methods. It achieved 87.37%, 94.90%, 94.14%, 99.14%, and 95.17% accuracy on the GROUPS, UFPR-Periocular, Ethnic-Ocular, IMP, and UBIPr datasets, respectively, in the open -world (OW) protocol. It further achieved 97.57% and 93.20% accuracy for adult periocular images from the GROUPS dataset in the closed-world (CW) and OW protocols, respectively. The results showed that the middle region between the eyes plays a crucial role in the recognition of masculine features, and feminine features can be identified through the eyebrow, upper eyelids, and corners of the eyes. Furthermore, using a whole region without cropping enhances PeriGender's learning capability, improving its understanding of both eyes' global structure without discontinuity.