Age estimation via selecting discriminated features and preserving geometry

Abstract

Human apparent age estimation has become a popular research topic and attracted great attention in recent years due to its wide applications, such as personal security and law enforcement. To achieve the goal of age estimation, a large number of methods have been pro-posed, where the models derived through the cumulative attribute coding achieve promised performance by preserving the neighbor-similarity of ages. However, these methods afore-mentioned ignore the geometric structure of extracted facial features. Indeed, the geometric structure of data greatly affects the accuracy of prediction. To this end, we propose an age estimation algorithm through joint feature selection and manifold learning paradigms, so-called Feature-selected and Geometry-preserved Least Square Regression (FGLSR). Based on this, our proposed method, compared with the others, not only preserves the geometry structures within facial representations, but also selects the discriminative features. Moreover, a deep learning extension based FGLSR is proposed later, namely Feature selected and Geometry preserved Neural Network (FGNN). Finally, related experiments are conducted on Morph2 and FG-Net datasets for FGLSR and on Morph2 datasets for FGNN. Experimental results testify our method achieve the best performances.