Semantic Human Face Analysis for Multi-level Age Estimation

Abstract

Human face is one of the most widely used biometrics based on computer-vision to derive various useful information such as gender, ethnicity, age, and even identity. Facial age estimation has received great attention during the last decades because of its influence in many applications, like face recognition and verification, which may be affected by aging changes and signs which appear on human face along with age progression. Thus, it becomes a prominent challenge for many researchers. One of the most influential factors on age estimation is the type of features used in the model training process. Computer-vision is characterized by its superior ability to extract traditional facial features such as shape, size, texture, and deep features. However, it is still difficult for computers to extract and deal with semantic features inferred by human-vision. Therefore, we need somehow to bridge the semantic gap between machines and humans to enable utilization of the human brain capabilities of perceiving and processing visual information in semantic space. Our research aims to exploit human-vision in semantic facial feature extraction and fusion with traditional computer-vision features to obtain integrated and more informative features as an initial study paving the way to further augment the outperforming state-of-the-art age estimation models. A hierarchical automatic age estimation is achieved upon two consecutive stages: classification to predict (high-level) age group, followed by regression to estimate (low-level) exact age. The results showed noticeable performance improvements, when fusing semantic-based features with traditional vision-based features, surpassing the performance of traditional features alone.