Age Estimation of Faces in Videos Using Head Pose Estimation and Convolutional Neural Networks

Age estimation from human faces is an important yet challenging task in computer vision because of the large differences between physical age and apparent age. Due to the differences including races, genders, and other factors, the performance of a learning method for this task strongly depends on the training data. Although many inspiring works have focused on the age estimation of a single human face through deep learning, the existing methods still have lower performance when dealing with faces in videos because of the differences in head pose between frames, which can lead to greatly different results. In this paper, a combined system of age estimation and head pose estimation is proposed to improve the performance of age estimation from faces in videos. We use deep regression forests (DRFs) to estimate the age of facial images, while a multiloss convolutional neural network is also utilized to estimate the head pose. Accordingly, we estimate the age of faces only for head poses within a set degree threshold to enable value refinement. First, we divided the images in the Cross-Age Celebrity Dataset (CACD) and the Asian Face Age Dataset (AFAD) according to the estimated head pose degrees and generated separate age estimates for images with different poses. The experimental results showed that the accuracy of age estimation from frontal facial images was better than that for faces at different angles, thus demonstrating the effect of head pose on age estimation. Further experiments were conducted on several videos to estimate the age of the same person with his or her face at different angles, and the results show that our proposed combined system can provide more precise and reliable age estimates than a system without head pose estimation.