Facial Age Estimation using Transfer Learning and Bayesian Optimization based on Gender Information

Abstract

Age estimation of unrestricted imaging circumstances has attracted an augmented recognition as it is appropriate in several real-world applications such as surveillance, face recognition, age synthesis, access control, and electronic customer relationship management. Current deep learning-based methods have displayed encouraging performance in age estimation field. Males and Females have a variable type of appearance aging pattern; this results in age differently. This fact leads to assuming that using gender information may improve the age estimator performance. We have proposed a novel model based on Gender Classification. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to get Gender Information, then Bayesian Optimization is applied to this pre-trained CNN when fine-tuned for age estimation task. Bayesian Optimization reduces the classification error on the validation set for the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments are done to assess our proposed model on two data sets: FERET and FG-NET. The experiments’ result indicates that using a pre-trained CNN containing Gender Information with Bayesian Optimization outperforms the state of the arts on FERET and FG-NET data sets with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1.2 and 2.67 respectively.