text: Predicting a person's gender based on the iris texture has been explored by several researchers. This paper considers several dimensions of experimental work on this problem, including person-disjoint train and test, and the effect of cosmetics on eyelash occlusion and imperfect segmentation. We also consider the use of multi-layer perceptron and convolutional neural networks as classifiers, comparing the use of data-driven and hand-crafted features. Our results suggest that the gender-from-iris problem is more difficult than has so far been appreciated. Estimating accuracy using a mean of N person-disjoint train and test partitions, and considering the effect of makeup - a combination of experimental conditions not present in any previous work - we find a much weaker ability to predict gender-from-iris texture than has been suggested in previous work.
  @cite_12: This paper employs machine learning techniques to develop models that predict gender based on the iris texture features. While there is a large body of research that explores biometrics as a means of verifying identity, there has been very little work done to determine if biometric measures can be used to determine specific human attributes. If it is possible to discover such attributes, they would be useful in situations where a biometric system fails to identify an individual that has not been enrolled, yet still needs to be identified. The iris was selected as the biometric to analyze for two major reasons: (1) quality methods have already been developed to segment and encode an iris image, (2) current iris encoding methods are conducive to selecting and extracting attributes from an iris texture and creating a meaningful feature vector.
summary: Gender is one soft biometric attribute, and gender recognition has been explored using biometric traits such as faces, fingerprints, gait and irises. The earliest work on gender-from-iris @cite_12 used a classifier based on decision trees, and reported an accuracy of about 75 extracted hand-crafted geometric and texture features from log-Gabor-filtered images in a dataset of over 57,000 images. The training and testing sets were not person-disjoint, which typically results in a higher estimated accuracy than can be expected for new persons.