We have learnt, in great detail, about detecting faces in images. We saw that face detection in itself is a rather complicated thing to accomplish. But, we wish to go a step further! If you look at it from a commercial point of view, simply saying that a face exists in an image is not that exciting. The real questions that one might be interested in come into the picture after the face has been detected. These are questions such as "Whom does the face belong to?", "Is it a male or a female?" or "Is the person happy or sad?" We can have more directed questions, such as "Is the person in the picture wearing a hat?" or "What is the color of their clothing?"
As part of this book, we will show you how to build a system that answers one of the preceding questions, "Is it a male or a female?" Over the next few chapters, we will show you, step-by-step, how to build a computer vision system that recognizes the gender of a person just from the image of his/her face.
During the...