A Study on Apparent Age Estimation

Age estimation from facial images is an important problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. Typically the goal is to predict the chronological age of a person given his or her face picture. It is seldom to study a related problem, that is, how old does a person look like from?the face photo? It is called apparent age estimation. A key difference between apparent age estimation and the traditional age estimation is that the age labels are annotated by human assessors rather than the real chronological age. The challenge for apparent age estimation is that there are?not many face images available with annotated age labels. Further, the annotated age labels for each face photo may not be consistent among different assessors. We study the problem of apparent age estimation by addressing the issues from different aspects, such as how to utilize a large number of face images without apparent age labels to learn a face representation using the deep neural networks, how to tune the deep networks using a limited number of examples with apparent age labels, and how well the machine learning methods can perform to estimate apparent ages. The apparent age data is from the ChaLearn Looking At People (LAP) challenge 2015. Using the protocol and time frame given by the challenge competition, we have achieved an error of 0.294835 on the final evaluation, and our result has been ranked the 3rd place in this competition.