  Predicting a person's gender based on the iris texture has been explored by
several researchers. This paper considers several dimensions of experimental
work on this problem, including person-disjoint train and test, and the effect
of cosmetics on eyelash occlusion and imperfect segmentation. We also consider
the use of multi-layer perceptron and convolutional neural networks as
classifiers, comparing the use of data-driven and hand-crafted features. Our
results suggest that the gender-from-iris problem is more difficult than has so
far been appreciated. Estimating accuracy using a mean of N person-disjoint
train and test partitions, and considering the effect of makeup - a combination
of experimental conditions not present in any previous work - we find a much
weaker ability to predict gender-from-iris texture than has been suggested in
previous work.
