Fusion of multiple facial features for age estimation

Abstract

A novel age estimation method is presented which improves performance by fusing complementary information acquired from global and local features of the face. Two-directional two-dimensional principal component analysis ((2D) 2PCA) is used for dimensionality reduction and construction of individual feature spaces. Each feature space contributes a confidence value which is calculated by Support vector machines (SVMs). The confidence values of all the facial features are then fused for final age estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that fusing multiple facial features can achieve significant accuracy gains over any single feature. Finally, we propose a fusion method that further improves accuracy. Copyright © 2009 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.