title: Geometric facial gender scoring: objectivity of perception.
abstract: Gender score is the cognitive judgement of the degree of masculinity or femininity of a face which is considered to be a continuum. Gender scores have long been used in psychological studies to understand the complex psychosocial relationships between people. Perceptual scores for gender and attractiveness have been employed for quality assessment and planning of cosmetic facial surgery. Various neurological disorders have been linked to the facial structure in general and the facial gender perception in particular. While, subjective gender scoring by human raters has been a tool of choice for psychological studies for many years, the process is both time and resource consuming. In this study, we investigate the geometric features used by the human cognitive system in perceiving the degree of masculinity/femininity of a 3D face. We then propose a mathematical model that can mimic the human gender perception. For our experiments, we obtained 3D face scans of 64 subjects using the 3dMDface scanner. The textureless 3D face scans of the subjects were then observed in different poses and assigned a gender score by 75 raters of a similar background. Our results suggest that the human cognitive system employs a combination of Euclidean and geodesic distances between biologically significant landmarks of the face for gender scoring. We propose a mathematical model that is able to automatically assign an objective gender score to a 3D face with a correlation of up to 0.895 with the human subjective scores.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia.
authors.forename: Syed Zulqarnain
authors.initials: SZ
authors.lastname: Gilani
authors.affiliation: School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia.
authors.forename: Kathleen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Rooney
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia.
authors.forename: Faisal
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Shafait
authors.affiliation: Cranio-MaxilloFacial Unit, Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, Perth, Western Australia.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Walters
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia.
authors.forename: Ajmal
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mian
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000465:Algorithms; D016002:Discriminant Analysis; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D055815:Young Adult