A study on human age estimation under facial expression changes

Abstract

In this paper, we study human age estimation in face images under significant expression changes. We will address two issues: (1) Is age estimation affected by facial expression changes and how significant is the influence? (2) How to develop a robust method to perform age estimation undergoing various facial expression changes? This systematic study will not only discover the relation between age estimation and expression changes, but also contribute a robust solution to solve the problem of cross-expression age estimation. This study is an important step towards developing a practical and robust age estimation system that allows users to present their faces naturally (with various expressions) rather than constrained to the neutral expression only. Two databases originally captured in the Psychology community are introduced to Computer Vision, to quantitatively demonstrate the influence of expression changes on age estimation, and evaluate the proposed framework and corresponding methods for cross-expression age estimation.