Gender classification demonstrates high accuracy in many previous works. However, it does not generalize very well in unconstrained settings and environments. Furthermore, many proposed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based solutions vary significantly in their characteristics and architectures, which calls for optimal CNN architecture for this specific task. In this work, a hand-crafted, custom CNN architecture is proposed to distinguish between male and female facial images. This custom CNN requires smaller input image resolutions and significantly fewer trainable parameters than some popular state-of-the-arts such as GoogleNet and AlexNet. It also employs batch normalization layers which results in better computation efficiency. Based on experiments using publicly available datasets such as LFW, CelebA and IMDB-WIKI datasets, the proposed custom CNN delivered the fastest inference time in all tests, where it needs only 0.92ms to classify 1200 images on GPU, 1.79ms on CPU, and 2.51ms on VPU. The custom CNN also delivers performance on-par with state-of-the-arts and even surpassed these methods in CelebA gender classification where it delivered the best result at 96% accuracy. Moreover, in a more challenging cross-dataset inference, custom CNN trained using CelebA dataset gives the best gender classification accuracy for tests on IMDB and WIKI datasets at 97% and 96% accuracy respectively.
Gender classification using custom convolutional neural networks architecture