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
1916406603 2950094539 1965804146
Automatic age and gender classification has become relevant to an increasing amount of applications, particularly since the rise of social platforms and social media. Nevertheless, performance of existing methods on real-world images is still significantly lacking, especially when compared to the tremendous leaps in performance recently reported for the related task of face recognition. In this paper we show that by learning representations through the use of deep-convolutional neural networks (CNN), a significant increase in performance can be obtained on these tasks. To this end, we propose a simple convolutional net architecture that can be used even when the amount of learning data is limited. We evaluate our method on the recent Adience benchmark for age and gender estimation and show it to dramatically outperform current state-of-the-art methods. This paper concerns the estimation of facial attributesnamely, age and genderfrom images of faces acquired in challenging, in the wild conditions. This problem has received far less attention than the related problem of face recognition, and in particular, has not enjoyed the same dramatic improvement in capabilities demonstrated by contemporary face recognition systems. Here, we address this problem by making the following contributions. First, in answer to one of the key problems of age estimation researchabsence of datawe offer a unique data set of face images, labeled for age and gender, acquired by smart-phones and other mobile devices, and uploaded without manual filtering to online image repositories. We show the images in our collection to be more challenging than those offered by other face-photo benchmarks. Second, we describe the dropout-support vector machine approach used by our system for face attribute estimation, in order to avoid over-fitting. This method, inspired by the dropout learning techniques now popular with deep belief networks, is applied here for training support vector machines, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time. Finally, we present a robust face alignment technique, which explicitly considers the uncertainties of facial feature detectors. We report extensive tests analyzing both the difficulty levels of contemporary benchmarks as well as the capabilities of our own system. These show our method to outperform state-of-the-art by a wide margin. We present two novel methods for face verification. Our first method - attribute classifiers - uses binary classifiers trained to recognize the presence or absence of describable aspects of visual appearance (e.g., gender, race, and age). Our second method - simile classifiers - removes the manual labeling required for attribute classification and instead learns the similarity of faces, or regions of faces, to specific reference people. Neither method requires costly, often brittle, alignment between image pairs; yet, both methods produce compact visual descriptions, and work on real-world images. Furthermore, both the attribute and simile classifiers improve on the current state-of-the-art for the LFW data set, reducing the error rates compared to the current best by 23.92 and 26.34 , respectively, and 31.68 when combined. For further testing across pose, illumination, and expression, we introduce a new data set - termed PubFig - of real-world images of public figures (celebrities and politicians) acquired from the internet. This data set is both larger (60,000 images) and deeper (300 images per individual) than existing data sets of its kind. Finally, we present an evaluation of human performance. Given the prevalence of social media websites, one challenge facing computer vision researchers is to devise methods to search for persons of interest among the billions of shared photos on these websites. Despite significant progress in face recognition, searching a large collection of unconstrained face images remains a difficult problem. To address this challenge, we propose a face search system which combines a fast search procedure, coupled with a state-of-the-art commercial off the shelf (COTS) matcher, in a cascaded framework. Given a probe face, we first filter the large gallery of photos to find the top- @math most similar faces using features learned by a convolutional neural network. The @math retrieved candidates are re-ranked by combining similarities based on deep features and those output by the COTS matcher. We evaluate the proposed face search system on a gallery containing @math million web-downloaded face images. Experimental results demonstrate that while the deep features perform worse than the COTS matcher on a mugshot dataset (93.7 percent versus 98.6 percent TAR@FAR of 0.01 percent), fusing the deep features with the COTS matcher improves the overall performance ( @math percent TAR@FAR of 0.01 percent). This shows that the learned deep features provide complementary information over representations used in state-of-the-art face matchers. On the unconstrained face image benchmarks, the performance of the learned deep features is competitive with reported accuracies. LFW database: @math percent accuracy under the standard protocol and @math percent TAR@FAR of @math percent under the BLUFR protocol; IJB-A benchmark: @math percent TAR@FAR of @math percent (verificat