Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.

10 (2021), 1249 - 1256

Research Article

Gender Classification Based on Fingerprint Analysis

G. Jayakala a, and Dr. L.R. Sudhab

a
Research Scholar, Department of Computer and Information Science, Annamalai
University
bAssociate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Annamalai University

Article History: Received: 10 January 2021; Revised: 12 February 2021; Accepted: 27 March 2021; Published
online: 28 April 2021
Abstract: Gender classification plays an active role in several applications such as biometrics, criminology,surveillance, human
computer interaction, commercial profiling. Though bbiometric traits such as face, gait, iris and hand shape are used for gender
classification in the past, majority of the work is based on face as it contains more prominent features than others. In this paper
we have analyzed fingerprints for gender classification with a hope that it has great potential for future research. We have
employed a three convolutional layer CNN with rectified linear (ReLu) and tanh activation functions on NIST database which
contains a set of 4000 images and achieved 99% accuracy. Performance of the proposed system demonstrated that fingerprints
contains vital features to discriminate gender of a person.
Keywords: Biometric, convolutional neural network (CNN), fingerprint, gender classification

1. Introduction
A fingerprint image is a pattern of ridges and valleys, with ridges are dark lines while valleys are light areas
between the ridges. Its uniqueness is suitable for biometric authentication systems than others because fingerprints
have advantages such as: feasible, differ from each other (distinct), permanent, accurate, reliable and acceptable.
This can be used by anthropologists to classify gender from the fingerprints obtained from articles and by crime
investigators to minimize the range of the suspects. Although fingerprints are one of the most mature biometric
technologies and are considered as legitimate proofs of evidence in courts of law all over the world, relatively
little machine vision method has been proposed for gender identification. Studies carried out so for in gender
determination have used generally ridge related parameters such as fingerprint ridge count, ridge density, ridge
thickness to valley thickness ratio, ridge width and fingerprint patterns and pattern types. Presently several
application areas have embraced the fusion of features and synthesis to classifier, such as image recognition. Most
of the available research on gender classification using fingerprints are based on the fingerprint patterns such as
whorl, left loop, right loop, arch and tented arch shown in figure 1. These approaches have given insight about
the ridge parameters but fails to give accurate measuring of the parameter.
1.1. Arch
It is a wave-like pattern. An arch has friction ridges that enter on one side and cross to the other side while
rising upward in the middle. There are two types of arches. They are plain which has no delta or core, and tented
which has a delta in the center. Tented arches rise to a sharper point than plain arches.
1.2. Loop
This fingerprint pattern enters and leave the same way. Two types of loops are available. Radial, which opens
toward the thumb and Ulnar, which opens toward “pinky” (little finger).
1.3. Whorl
A plain whorl has two deltas and at least one ridge making a complete circuit. It may be spiral, oval or any
variant of the circle.

Figure 1. Fingerprint classes (a) Whorl (b) right loop (c) left loop (d) arch (e) tented arch
2. Related Works
S.F. Abdullah, and Z.A. Abas[1], proposed a multilayer perceptron neural network in classifying gender using
fingerprint. The classification is achieved by extracting the fingerprint features from ridge thickness, ridge density
to valley thickness ratio and white line count. This study found that women has a higher value in ridge thickness
and ridge valley ratio. Emanuelamar as go [2] used quality and texture features to estimate age and gender from
fingerprints. In this work they proposed a methodology to automatically infer age and gender from fingerprint
images. In this classification model, texture of an image was captured using Local Binary Pattern(LBP) and Local
Phase Quantization(LPQ) operators and achieved 89.1%. accuracy.
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Hazım Kemal Ekenel [3], have shown that generic and domain specific deep CNN models can be transferred
successfully for age and gender classification problems. By using appropriate transfer learning approaches a pre-
trained CNN model can perform even better than training a new task specific. Gil Levi and Tal Hassner [4],
classified age and gender using CNN. They used a modern deep CNN. Their network was relatively modest due
to the limited computational resources of the time and the algorithmic challenges of training bigger networks.
They have resolved overfitting problem by deep convolutional neural network. Suman Sahu and prabakarrao[5],
compared the result of neural network and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system(ANFIS) result in determination
gender using fingerprint. In this approach they used Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to decompose the
fingerprint image into a multi-resolution representation in order to keep the least coefficients possible without
losing useful image information. They found that the resultant 2-D wavelet decomposition of an image such as
low–low (LL), low–high (LH), high–low (HL), and high–high (HH) sub-bands represent different image
properties. Mangesh K. and Shinde[6] analyzed fingerprint image for gender classification or identificationusing
Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition. They verified, the performance of the proposed gender
classification algorithm by using the internal database and summarized the success rate (in percentage) of gender
classification using DWT, SVD and combination of both by a KNN classifier. S.S.Gornale, and Basavanna M [7]
proposed a model for gender classification of fingerprints based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) with 10-
cross validation technique. They divided the work into three sections, first is pre-processing of all fingerprint’s
images, second is computation of statistical features of Discrete wavelet transform and third is classification of
testing fingerprints as male and female finger-prints using SVM classifiers with RBFsigma and Quadratic kernel
function. All the above-mentioned models are not efficient as they require more computational time to train and
validate the data. We have proposed a convolutional model for fingerprint gender classification.
3.Proposed work
In this paper, we have utilized Convolutional neural network (CNN) model for gender classification based on
fingerprint images. It is a well-known model applied in numerous computer vision applications. In this work we
exploit the unique ability of CNN to train a model to determine gender of the images from the fingerprint dataset.
The CNN used in this work uses the construction shown in figure 2.

Figure 2. CNN Architecture

3.1 Convolutional Layer
The most critical component in the model is the convolutional layer. This part aims at reducing the size of the
image for faster computations of the weights and improve its generalization. The CNN model has three
convolutional layers with 20 3x3, 40 3x3, 60 3x3, 80 3x3 filter kernels. Each convolutional layer consists of a
bank of filters (weights) that are convolved with the output of the previous layer, or the input image if it is the
first layer, to produce some response. The convolutional layers extract features from the input images. The first
convolutional layer extracts low level features such as lines and edges and the higher-level layers extracts high
level features. During the convolutional part, the network keeps the essential features of the image and excludes
irrelevant noise. Moreover, the output of every convolutional layer is shaped by a rectifier linear unit (ReLU)
function.
3.2. Pooling Layer
The sub sampling layer is used to reduce the feature resolution. This layer reduces the number of connections
between the convolutional layers, so it will reduce the computation timealso. In each case, the input image is
divided into non-overlapping two dimensional spaces. The input size is 4x4 and sub sampling size is 2x2. A 4x4
image is divided into four non-overlapping matrices of size 2x2. The max-pooling layer performs sub-sampling
on the outputs generated by the previous convolutional layers by selecting the maximum value in an MxM
window. In the case of min pooling, the minimum value of the four values is selected. Illustration of max pooling

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Research Article

and min pooling is shown in figure 3. By reducing the dimensionality, the network has lower weights to compute,
so it prevents overfitting.

Figure 3. Process of Pooling Operations

3.3. Activation Function
The Activation Function is for improving the CNN performance.There are three familiar activation function
such as Sigmoid, Tanh and Relu. The performance of the sstandard activation function Relu has been compared
with tanh activation function in this paper. Its role is to remove every negative value from the filtered images and
replace it with zeros which is depicted in figure 4. The relu activation function is defined as:
𝑏𝑖,𝑗,𝑘 = max⁡(𝑎𝑖,𝑗,𝑘, 0)
Where, 𝑎𝑖,𝑗,𝑘, is the input of the activation function at location (i,j) on the k-th channel. In this every negative
value from the filtered images is replaced with zero.

Figure 4. Relu Activation Function

3.4. Fully Connected Layer
The fully connected layer connects a set of neurons to each of the neurons of the previous layer. The flatten
layer simply vectorizes and connects all of the neurons from the outputs of the previous layer to all of the neurons
in the fully connected layer. All of the convolutional layer and the first fully connected layer use the rectifier
linear activation function(ReLu).Several software packages are available to provide a framework for
implementing neural networks.The work presented here uses Kera’s, which is a Python library that provides easy
to use abstractions to powerful learning libraries such as Theano and TensorFlow (used here). Convolutional
neural networks retain spatial information through filter kernels. In this work we exploit this unique capability of
CNN to train a model to classify images.
4.Experimental Result and Analysis
In this section, we present and discuss the results of the proposed gender recognition system. We tested the
system using a well-known public domain fingerprint database NIST DB4. First, we give an overview of these
databases and the experimental setup used for each database. For evaluating our proposed approach, we have
used NIST DB4 dataset.This is a large fingerprint dataset used for gender classification, which contains 4000
images of size 512*512, where 3200 are training image, and 800 are testing image. Some of the sample fingerprint
images from NIST dataset for different features such as Arch(A), Right loop(RL), Left loop(LL), Whorl(W),
Tented arch(T) are shown in figure 5. Experiments are conducted on 2 classes such as male and female from the
NIST DB4 dataset using CNN model. The CNN model was trained and tested with 4000 images using tensor

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flow in core i7 CPU 2.6 GHz, 1-TB hard disk, and 8-GB RAM. Sample training male and female fingerprint
images are shown in figure 6.

Figure 5. Fingerprint classes

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Figure 6. Sample input fingerprint images of male and female

Confusion matrix in figure 9 is used for summarizing the performance of our classification algorithm where
the number of correct and incorrect predictions are summarized.
Table1. Confusion Matrix
Class Name Male Female
Male 99 1
Female 1 99

By using the four combinations of predicted and actual values such as TP, FP, TN, FN we have evaluated the
performance of proposed framework. TP stands for true positive, which represents system has recognized positive
as positive, TN means true negative which means system identifies negative as negative, FP is false positive
which predicts negative as positive and FN is false negative which predicts positive as negative. Accuracy is
defined as the ratio of the number of genders correctly classified to the total number of genders as given in
equation 1. To illustrate the results more extensively we adopt Precision, Recall and F-measure which are defined
by equations 2,3,4 respectively. F-measure is used as an evaluation metric for measuring regression performance
of our proposed approach. The large value of F-measure indicates higher classification rate.
Total⁡no.of⁡correct⁡prediction
Accuracy = ⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡⁡(1)
No.of⁡input⁡samples

iTP
PREi = TP +FP (2)
i i

i TP
RECi = TP +FN (3)
i i

PRE ×REC
F1i = PREi+RECi (4)
i i

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In this work we have fine-tuned the hyperparameters of activation functions namely ReLu and Tanh. Figure
7 shows one predicted output of the proposed model. Accuracy and loss curve of the proposed model is given in
figure 8.

Figure 7. Classified Output

Figure 8. Accuracy and Loss graph for the proposed model

Table 2 displays the values of performance metrics of the proposed approach and Figure 10 is the
corresponding chart. Performance metrics table shows that the proposed approach with Relu activation function
efficiently classified the image with an accuracy of 99% and an accuracy of 74.5% for Tanh by training the
network model for 20 epochs.
Table 2. Performance Metrics of the proposed approach
Activation function Epochs Accuracy Precision Recall F1-score

10 88.5% 87.7% 88.2% 88%

ReLu
20 99% 99% 99% 99%

10 85.2% 85.1% 84.8% 85%

Tanh
20 87.6% 87.3% 87.2% 87%

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Figure 9. Performance chart of proposed approach

5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have proposed a gender classification model which is a easy task of humans but not to
machines. CNN which is one of the widely used model to classify images is employed to classify gender based
on fingerprint images. We have trained the convolutional model with images from NIST DB4 using the activation
function ReLu and Tanh for epochs ranging from 10 to 20. We got the optimal performance of 99% accuracy for
Relu activation function at 20th epoch. This model can be used to reduce search space in other applications such
as identification & authentication. Our upcoming work direction is to analyse the performance by using other
deep learning classifiers.
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