Gender recognition and age estimation based on human gait

In this study, the feasibility of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for gait based gender recognition and age estimation problems were investigated. For this purpose, different networks were evaluated and a basis was selected. Further adjustments were made on the basis network by experimenting on architectural options and hyperparameters. Two distinct yet similar architectures were proposed for each problem. The experiments were conducted by using gait silhouette average which is a feature descriptor as input. The overall accuracy was computed to be 97.45% using the proposed CNN architecture for gender recognition and 5.74 years mean absolute error for age estimation. Using CNN with gait silhouette average as an input is an understudied subject in the literature for these problem domains. While there is one study that uses this approach for gait based gender recognition, there are no studies evaluating CNN for gait based age estimation. The results show successful performance comparable to existing studies. Besides, the experimental results provide insight on how network structure and hyperparameters affect performance. Considering this, obtained outcome allows to gain insight about the problem domain of using gait feature descriptor for gender recognition and age estimation, and provides guidance about deciding on a CNN network in these problem domains. KEYWORDS: Gender Recognition, Age Estimation, Convolutional Neural Networks, Gait, Gait Silhouette