An analytic system for user gender identification through user shared images

Many social media applications, such as recommendation, virality prediction, and marketing, make use of user gender, which may not be explicitly specified or kept privately. Meanwhile, advancedmobile devices have become part of our lives and a huge amount of content is being generated by users every day, especially user shared images shared by individuals in social networks. This particular form of user generated content is widely accessible to others due to the sharing nature.When user gender is only accessible to exclusive parties, these user shared images are proved to be an easier way to identify user gender. This work investigated 3,152,344 images by 7,450 users from Fotolog and Flickr, two image-oriented social networks. It is observed that users who share visually similar images are more likely to have the same gender. A multimedia big data system that utilizes this phenomenon is proposed for user gender identification with 79% accuracy. These findings are useful for information or services in any social network with intensive image sharing.