Automatic age estimation from facial images represents an important task in computer vision. This paper analyses the effect of gender, age, ethnic, makeup and expression attributes of faces as sources of bias to improve deep apparent age prediction. Following recent works where it is shown that apparent age labels benefit real age estimation, rather than direct real to real age regression, our main contribution is the integration, in an end-to-end architecture, of face attributes for apparent age prediction with an additional loss for real age regression. Experimental results on the APPA-REAL dataset indicate the proposed network successfully take advantage of the adopted attributes to improve both apparent and real age estimation. Our model outperformed a state-of-the-art architecture proposed to separately address apparent and real age regression. Finally, we present preliminary results and discussion of a proof of concept application using the proposed model to regress the apparent age of an individual based on the gender of an external observer.
While state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms can provide accurate prediction performances for age estimation, either if real or apparent age are considered, they are still affected by different variations in face characteristics. But how can age prediction performances be enhanced in this case? With this objective in mind, the analysis of bias in age perception has recently emerged @cite_1 @cite_19 . Can we better understand age perception and their biases so that the findings can be used to regress a better real age estimation? In this line, Clap 'e s @cite_1 found some consistent biases in the APPA-REAL @cite_17 dataset when relating apparent to real age. However, an end-to-end approach for bias removal was not considered. According to Alvi @cite_19 , training an age predictor on a dataset that is not balanced for gender can lead to gender biased predictions. They presented an algorithm to remove biases from the feature representation, as well as to ensure that the network is blind to a known bias in the dataset. Thus, improving classification accuracy, particularly when training networks on extremely biased datasets.
@cite_19 @cite_1 @cite_17
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When analysing human activities using data mining or machine learning techniques, it can be useful to infer properties such as the gender or age of the people involved. This paper focuses on the sub-problem of gender recognition, which has been studied extensively in the literature, with two main problems remaining unsolved: how to improve the accuracy on real-world face images, and how to generalise the models to perform well on new datasets. We address these problems by collecting five million weakly labelled face images, and performing three different experiments, investigating: the performance difference between convolutional neural networks (CNNs) of differing depths and a support vector machine approach using local binary pattern features on the same training data, the effect of contextual information on classification accuracy, and the ability of convolutional neural networks and large amounts of training data to generalise to cross-database classification. We report record-breaking results on both the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 98.90 , and the Images of Groups (GROUPS) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.34 for cross-database gender classification. In this paper, we address the problem of apparent age estimation. Different from estimating the real age of individuals, in which each face image has a single age label, in this problem, face images have multiple age labels, corresponding to the ages perceived by the annotators, when they look at these images. This provides an intriguing computer vision problem, since in generic image or object classification tasks, it is typical to have a single ground truth label per class. To account for multiple labels per image, instead of using average age of the annotated face image as the class label, we have grouped the face images that are within a specified age range. Using these age groups and their age-shifted groupings, we have trained an ensemble of deep learning models. Before feeding an input face image to a deep learning model, five facial landmark points are detected and used for 2-D alignment. We have employed and fine tuned convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that are based on VGG-16 [24] architecture and pretrained on the IMDB-WIKI dataset [22]. The outputs of these deep learning models are then combined to produce the final estimation. Proposed method achieves 0.3668 error in the final ChaLearn LAP 2016 challenge test set [5]. Neural networks achieve the state-of-the-art in image classification tasks. However, they can encode spurious variations or biases that may be present in the training data. For example, training an age predictor on a dataset that is not balanced for gender can lead to gender biased predicitons (e.g. wrongly predicting that males are older if only elderly males are in the training set). We present two distinct contributions: 1) An algorithm that can remove multiple sources of variation from the feature representation of a network. We demonstrate that this algorithm can be used to remove biases from the feature representation, and thereby improve classification accuracies, when training networks on extremely biased datasets. 2) An ancestral origin database of 14,000 images of individuals from East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Europe. We demonstrate on this dataset, for a number of facial attribute classification tasks, that we are able to remove racial biases from the network feature representation. In this paper we tackle the estimation of apparent age in still face images with deep learning. Our convolutional neural networks (CNNs) use the VGG-16 architecture [13] and are pretrained on ImageNet for image classification. In addition, due to the limited number of apparent age annotated images, we explore the benefit of finetuning over crawled Internet face images with available age. We crawled 0.5 million images of celebrities from IMDB and Wikipedia that we make public. This is the largest public dataset for age prediction to date. We pose the age regression problem as a deep classification problem followed by a softmax expected value refinement and show improvements over direct regression training of CNNs. Our proposed method, Deep EXpectation (DEX) of apparent age, first detects the face in the test image and then extracts the CNN predictions from an ensemble of 20 networks on the cropped face. The CNNs of DEX were finetuned on the crawled images and then on the provided images with apparent age annotations. DEX does not use explicit facial landmarks. Our DEX is the winner (1st place) of the ChaLearn LAP 2015 challenge on apparent age estimation with 115 registered teams, significantly outperforming the human reference.