Two-Dimensional Heteroscedastic Discriminant Analysis for Facial Gender Classification

In this paper, a novel discriminant analysis named two-dimensional Heteroscedastic Discriminant Analysis (2DHDA) is presented, and used for gender classification. In 2DHDA, equal within-class covariance constraint is removed. Firstly, the criterion of 2DHDA is defined according to that of 2DLDA. Secondly, the criterion of 2DHDA, log and rearranging terms are taken, and then the optimal projection matrix is solved by gradient descent algorithm. Thirdly, face images are projected onto the optimal projection matrix, thus the 2DHDA features are extracted. Finally, Nearest Neighbor classifier is selected to perform gender classification. Experimental results show that higher recognition rate is obtained by way of 2DHDA compared with 2DLDA and HDA.