Digital Signage by Real-Time Gender Recognition from Face Images

Digital signage is a new advertising strategy using smart multimedia screens, which carries out the dynamic customization of the promotional content according to the customers who are looking at the monitor. Gender recognition from face images is among the most popular applications for digital signage, since it allows to select in real-time advertising spots customized for males or females. In this paper, we propose a system which implements this solution using a smart camera mounted above the monitor, dedicated to gender recognition in real-time, and a component that dynamically modifies the content projected on the screen according to the gender of the audience. The computer vision algorithm is designed to be as fast as effective, since the whole processing chain must be performed in real-time in order to avoid missing people passing in front of the screen. We evaluated the performance of the proposed solution on a standard dataset for gender recognition in the wild and in a real fair, obtaining a gender recognition accuracy of 94.99% and 92.70%, respectively, that is very relevant in such unconstrained scenarios. In addition, the method is able to process 5 fps on a smart camera and, thus, it can be used in a digital signage application.