Recently, deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performances in recognizing the age and gender on human face images. However, these models were applied in a black-box manner with no information provided about which facial features are actually used for prediction and how these features depend on image preprocessing, model initialization and architecture choice. We present a study investigating these different effects. In detail, our work compares four popular neural network architectures, studies the effect of pretraining, evaluates the robustness of the considered alignment preprocessings via cross-method test set swapping and intuitively visualizes the model's prediction strategies in given preprocessing conditions using the recent Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) algorithm. Our evaluations on the challenging Adience benchmark show that suitable parameter initialization leads to a holistic perception of the input, compensating artefactual data representations. With a combination of simple preprocessing steps, we reach state of the art performance in gender recognition.
One of the more recent face image data sets is the Adience benchmark @cite_13 , which has been published in 2014, containing 26,580 photos across 2,284 subjects with a binary gender label and one label from eight different age groups (0-2, 4-6, 8-13, 15-20, 25-32, 38-43, 48-53, 60-) , partitioned into five splits. The key principle of the data set is to capture the images as close to real world conditions as possible, including all variations in appearance, pose, lighting condition and image quality, to name a few. These conditions provide for an unconstrained and challenging learning problem: The first results on the Adience benchmark achieved @math 79.3 The first time a DNN model was applied to Adience benchmark was with @cite_37 . The authors did resort to an end-to-end training regime, the face frontalization preprocessing from @cite_40 was omitted and the model was completely trained from scratch, in order to demonstrate the feature learning capabilities of the neural network type classifier. The architecture used in @cite_37 is very similar to the BVLC Caffe Reference Model @cite_9 , with the fourth and fifth convolution layers being removed. The best reported accuracy ratings increased to @math 64 The @math 88.75
@cite_40 @cite_37 @cite_9 @cite_13
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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]. In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale face dataset named VGGFace2. The dataset contains 3.31 million images of 9131 subjects, with an average of 362.6 images for each subject. Images are downloaded from Google Image Search and have large variations in pose, age, illumination, ethnicity and profession (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians). The dataset was collected with three goals in mind: (i) to have both a large number of identities and also a large number of images for each identity; (ii) to cover a large range of pose, age and ethnicity; and (iii) to minimize the label noise. We describe how the dataset was collected, in particular the automated and manual filtering stages to ensure a high accuracy for the images of each identity. To assess face recognition performance using the new dataset, we train ResNet-50 (with and without Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks) Convolutional Neural Networks on VGGFace2, on MS- Celeb-1M, and on their union, and show that training on VGGFace2 leads to improved recognition performance over pose and age. Finally, using the models trained on these datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on all the IARPA Janus face recognition benchmarks, e.g. IJB-A, IJB-B and IJB-C, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. Datasets and models are publicly available. 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. 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.