Automatic age and gender classification using supervised appearance model

YesAge and gender classification are two important problems that recently gained popularity in the research community, due to their wide range of applications. Research has shown that both age and gender information are encoded in the face shape and texture, hence the active appearance model (AAM), a statistical model that captures shape and texture variations, has been one of the most widely used feature extraction techniques for the aforementioned problems. However, AAM suffers from some drawbacks, especially when used for classification. This is primarily because principal component analysis (PCA), which is at the core of the model, works in an unsupervised manner, i.e., PCA dimensionality reduction does not take into account how the predictor variables relate to the response (class labels). Rather, it explores only the underlying structure of the predictor variables, thus, it is no surprise if PCA discards valuable parts of the data that represent discriminatory features. Toward this end, we propose a supervised appearance model (sAM) that improves on AAM by replacing PCA with partial least-squares regression. This feature extraction technique is then used for the problems of age and gender classification. Our experiments show that sAM has better predictive power than the conventional AAM

Hybrid Ageing Patterns for Face Age Estimation

Wrinkles can be embedded in several image-based applications as a descriptor for human skin. However, wrinkle-based age estimation research has not been widely addressed. In this paper, we introduce a Multi-scale Wrinkle Patterns (MWP) representation, investigate the effect of wrinkles on face age estimation and propose Hybrid Ageing Patterns (HAP) for face age estimation. To define the wrinkle regions more precisely, a template consisting of 10 regions constructed relatively to a set of automatically located facial landmarks is used. We extract the multi-scale wrinkles in each region and encode them into MWP. We use Support Vector Regression to estimate age from the combination of such patterns. The performance of the algorithms is assessed by using Mean Absolute Error (MAE) on three state-of-the-art datasets - FG-NET, FERET and MORPH. We observe that MWP produces a comparable MAE of 4.16 on FERET to the state of the art. Finally we propose HAP, which combines the features from MWP and the Facial Appearance Model (FAM), and demonstrate improved performance on FERET and MORPH with MAE of 3.02 (±2.92) and 3.68 (±2.98), respectively. Therefore, we conclude that MWP is an important complementary feature for face age estimation

Automatic Age Estimation From Real-World And Wild Face Images By Using Deep Neural Networks

Automatic age estimation from real-world and wild face images is a challenging task and has an increasing importance due to its wide range of applications in current and future lifestyles. As a result of increasing age specific human-computer interactions, it is expected that computerized systems should be capable of estimating the age from face images and respond accordingly. Over the past decade, many research studies have been conducted on automatic age estimation from face images. In this research, new approaches for enhancing age classification of a person from face images based on deep neural networks (DNNs) are proposed. The work shows that pre-trained CNNs which were trained on large benchmarks for different purposes can be retrained and fine-tuned for age estimation from unconstrained face images. Furthermore, an algorithm to reduce the dimension of the output of the last convolutional layer in pre-trained CNNs to improve the performance is developed. Moreover, two new jointly fine-tuned DNNs frameworks are proposed. The first framework fine-tunes tow DNNs with two different feature sets based on the element-wise summation of their last hidden layer outputs. While the second framework fine-tunes two DNNs based on a new cost function. For both frameworks, each has two DNNs, the first DNN is trained by using facial appearance features that are extracted by a well-trained model on face recognition, while the second DNN is trained on features that are based on the superpixels depth and their relationships. Furthermore, a new method for selecting robust features based on the power of DNN and ??21-norm is proposed. This method is mainly based on a new cost function relating the DNN and the L21 norm in one unified framework. To learn and train this unified framework, the analysis and the proof for the convergence of the new objective function to solve minimization problem are studied. Finally, the performance of the proposed jointly fine-tuned networks and the proposed robust features are used to improve the age estimation from the facial images. The facial features concatenated with their corresponding robust features are fed to the first part of both networks and the superpixels features concatenated with their robust features are fed to the second part of the network. Experimental results on a public database show the effectiveness of the proposed methods and achieved the state-of-art performance on a public database