Gender classification is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision. Facial gender detection of
neonates and children is also known as a highly demanding issue for human observers. This study proposes a novel
gender classification method using frontal facial images of people. The proposed approach employs principal
component analysis (PCA) and fuzzy clustering technique, respectively, for feature extraction and classification steps. In
other words, PCA is applied to extract the most appropriate features from images as well as reducing the
dimensionality of data. The extracted features are then used to assign the new images to appropriate classes – male or
female – based on fuzzy clustering. The computational time and accuracy of the proposed method are examined
together and the prominence of the proposed approach compared to most of the other well-known competing
methods is proved, especially for younger faces. Experimental results indicate the considerable classification
accuracies which have been acquired for FG-Net, Stanford and FERET databases. Meanwhile, since the proposed
algorithm is relatively straightforward, its computational time is reasonable and often less than the other state-of-theart gender classification methods