Facial pose estimation has gained a lot of attentions in many practical applications, such as human-robot interaction, gaze estimation and driver monitoring. Meanwhile, end-to-end deep learning-based facial pose estimation is becoming more and more popular. However, facial pose estimation suffers from a key challenge: the lack of sufficient training data for many poses, especially for large poses. Inspired by the observation that the faces under close poses look similar, we reformulate the facial pose estimation as a label distribution learning problem, considering each face image as an example associated with a Gaussian label distribution rather than a single label, and construct a convolutional neural network which is trained with a multi-loss function on AFLW dataset and 300WLP dataset to predict the facial poses directly from color image. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular benchmarks, including AFLW2000, BIWI, AFLW and AFW, where our approach shows a significant advantage over other state-of-the-art methods.
 The increase of population causes the raise of security threat in crowed environment, which makes crowd counting becoming more and more important. For common complexity scenes, existing crowd counting approaches are mainly based on regression models which learn a mapping between low-level features and class labels. One of the major challenges for generating a good regression function is the insufficient and imbalanced training data. Observationally, the problem of crowd counting has the characteristic that crowd images with adjacent class labels contain similar features, which can be utilized to reduce the effect of insufficiency and imbalance by the strategy of information reuse. Consequently, this paper introduces a label distribution learning (LDL) strategy into crowd counting, where crowd images are labelled with label distributions instead of the conventional single labels. In this way, one crowd instance can contribute to not only the learning of its real class label, but also the learning of neighboring class labels. Hence the training data are increased significantly, and the classes with insufficient training data are supplied with more training data, which belongs to their adjacent classes. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and robustness of the LDL method for crowd counting. We have also shown the outstanding performance of the approach in different dataset. Apparent age estimation from face image has attracted more and more attentions as it is favorable in some real-world applications. In this work, we propose an end-to-end learning approach for robust apparent age estimation, named by us AgeNet. Specifically, we address the apparent age estimation problem by fusing two kinds of models, i.e., real-value based regression models and Gaussian label distribution based classification models. For both kind of models, large-scale deep convolutional neural network is adopted to learn informative age representations. Another key feature of the proposed AgeNet is that, to avoid the problem of over-fitting on small apparent age training set, we exploit a general-to-specific transfer learning scheme. Technically, the AgeNet is first pre-trained on a large-scale web-collected face dataset with identity label, and then it is fine-tuned on a large-scale real age dataset with noisy age label. Finally, it is fine-tuned on a small training set with apparent age label. The experimental results on the ChaLearn 2015 Apparent Age Competition demonstrate that our AgeNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance in apparent age estimation. Two key challenges lie in the facial attractiveness computation research: the lack of discriminative face representations, and the scarcity of sufficient and complete training data. Motivated by recent promising work in face recognition using deep neural networks to learn effective features, the first challenge is expected to be addressed from a deep learning point of view. A very deep residual network is utilized to enable automatic learning of hierarchical aesthetics representation. The inspiration to deal with the second challenge comes from the natural representation of the training data, where each training face can be associated with a label (score) distribution given by human raters rather than a single label (average score). This paper, therefore, recasts facial attractiveness computation as a label distribution learning problem. Integrating these two ideas, an end-to-end attractiveness learning framework is established. We also perform feature-level fusion by incorporating the low-level geometric features to further improve the computational performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on a standard benchmark, the SCUT-FBP dataset, where our approach shows significant advantages over the other state-of-the-art work. This paper studies an interesting problem: is it possible to predict the crowd opinion about a movie before the movie is actually released? The crowd opinion is here expressed by the distribution of ratings given by a sufficient amount of people. Consequently, the pre-release crowd opinion prediction can be regarded as a Label Distribution Learning (LDL) problem. In order to solve this problem, a Label Distribution Support Vector Regressor (LDSVR) is proposed in this paper. The basic idea of LDSVR is to fit a sigmoid function to each component of the label distribution simultaneously by a multi-output support vector machine. Experimental results show that LDSVR can accurately predict peoples's rating distribution about a movie just based on the pre-release metadata of the movie.