The aim in this paper is to explore whether the Fisher-Rao metric can be used to characterise the shape changes due to gender difference. We work using a 2.5D representation based on facial surface normals (or facial needle-maps) for gender classification. The needle-map is a shape representation which can be acquired from 2D intensity images using shape-from-shading (SFS). Using the von-Mises Fisher distribution, we compute the elements of the Fisher information matrix, and use this to compute geodesic distance between fields of surface normals to construct a shape-space. We embed the fields of facial surface normals into a low dimensional pattern space using a number of alternative methods including multidimensional scaling, heat kernel embedding and commute time embedding. We present results on clustering the embedded faces using the Max Planck and EAR database.
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