Cite as:
O'Toole A J, Vetter T, Troje N F, Bülthoff H H, 1997, "Sex classification is better with three-dimensional head structure than with image intensity information" Perception 26(1) 75 – 84
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Sex classification is better with three-dimensional head structure than with image intensity information

Alice J O'Toole, Thomas Vetter, Nikolaus F Troje, Heinrich H Bülthoff

Received 17 April 1996, in revised form 22 November 1996

Abstract. The sex of a face is perhaps its most salient feature. A principal components analysis (PCA) was applied separately to the three-dimensional (3-D) structure and graylevel image (GLI) data from laser-scanned human heads. Individual components from both analyses captured information related to the sex of the face. Notably, single projection coefficients characterized complex differences between the 3-D structure of male and female heads and between male and female GLI maps. In a series of simulations, the quality of the information available in the 3-D head versus GLI data for predicting the sex of the face has been compared. The results indicated that the 3-D head data supported more accurate sex classification than the GLI data, across a range of PCA-compressed (dimensionality-reduced) representations of the heads. This kind of dual face representation can give insight into the nature of the information available to humans for categorizing and remembering faces.

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