Extracting human attributes using a convolutional neural network approach

We proposed a method to extract and classify soft biometrics from images.We employed convolutional neural networks to build an end-to-end classifier.We were able to classify images by means of clothes and gender.The proposed method can deal with multiple labels simultaneously. Extracting high level information from digital images and videos is a hard problem frequently faced by the computer vision and machine learning communities. Modern surveillance systems can monitor people, cars or objects by using computer vision methods. The objective of this work is to propose a method for identifying soft-biometrics, in the form of clothing and gender, from images containing people, as a previous step for further identifying people themselves. We propose a solution to this classification problem using a Convolutional Neural Network, working as an all-in-one feature extractor and classifier. This method allows the development of a high-level end-to-end clothing/gender classifier. Experiments were done comparing the CNN with hand-designed classifiers. Also, two different operating modes of CNN are proposed and compared each other. The results obtained were very promising, showing that is possible to extract soft-biometrics attributes using an end-to-end CNN classifier. The proposed method achieved a good generalization capability, classifying the three different attributes with good accuracy. This suggests the possibility to search images using soft biometrics as search terms.