Age estimation based on complexity-aware features

Abstract

The research related to age estimation using face images has become increasingly important. We propose an age estimator using two kinds of local features, the gradient features which well describe the local characteristic, and the Gabor wavelets which reflect the multi-scale directional information. The RealAdaBoost algorithm with a complexity penalty term in the feature selection module is applied to choose meaningful regions from human face for feature extraction, while balancing the discriminative capability and the computation cost at the same time. Furthermore, the ierarchical classifier, which is composed of an age group classification (e.g., 15–39 years old, 40–59 years old etc.) and a detailed age estimation (e.g. 19, 53 years old, etc.) are utilized to get the final age. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the methods using single feature on PAL and FG-NET database. It also achieves competitive accuracy with the state-of-the-art algorithms.