Due to technical advancements and the proliferation of mobile applications, facial analysis (FA) of humans has recently become an important area for computer vision research. FA investigates a variety of difficulties, including gender recognition, facial expression recognition, age and race recognition, with the goal of automatically comprehending social interactions. Due to the dimensional challenge posed by pre-trained CNN networks, the scientific community has developed numerous techniques inspired by biology, swarm intelligence theory, physics, and mathematical rules. This article presents a gender recognition system based on scAOA, that is a modified version of the Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA). The latest variant (scAOA) enhances the exploitation stage by using trigonometric operators inspired by the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) in order to prevent local optima and to accelerate the convergence. The main purpose of this paper is to apply scAOA to select the relevant deep features provided by two pretrained models of CNN (AlexNet & ResNet) to recognize the gender of a human person categorized into two classes (men and women). Two datasets are used to evaluate the proposed approach (scAOA): the Brazilian FEI dataset and the Georgia Tech Face dataset (GT). In terms of accuracy, Fscore and statistical test, the comparison analysis demonstrates that scAOA outperforms other modern and competitive optimizers such as AOA, SCA, Ant lion optimizer (ALO), Salp swarm algorithm (SSA), Grey wolf optimizer (GWO), Simple genetic algorithm (SGA), Grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) and Particle swarm optimizer (PSO).
Keywords: Facial analysis; Gender recognition; Pretrained CNN; Sine cosine archimedes optimization algorithm (scAOA); Trigonometric operators; Wrapper feature selection (FS).
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