Hardware/software co-design for a gender recognition embedded system

Gender recognition has applications in human-computer interaction, biometric authentication, and targeted marketing. This paper presents an implementation of an algorithm for binary male/female gender recognition from face images based on a shunting inhibitory convolutional neural network, which has a reported accuracy on the FERET database of 97.2 %. The proposed hardware/software co-design approach using an ARM processor and FPGA can be used as an embedded system for a targeted marketing application to allow real-time processing. A threefold speedup is achieved in the presented approach compared to a software implementation on the ARM processor alone