No abstract

In our daily life, it is much easier to distinguish which person is elder between two persons than how old a person is. When inferring a person's age, we may compare his or her face with many people whose ages are known, resulting in a series of comparative results, and then we conjecture the age based on the comparisons. This process involves numerous pairwise preferences information obtained by a series of queries, where each query compares the target person's face to those faces in a database. In this paper, we propose a ranking-based framework consisting of a set of binary queries. Each query collects a binary-classification-based comparison result. All the query results are then fused to predict the age. Experimental results show that our approach performs better than traditional multi-class-based and regression-based approaches for age estimation.

This paper presents a cost-sensitive ordinal hyperplanes ranking algorithm for human age estimation based on face images. The proposed approach exploits relative-order information among the age labels for rank prediction. In our approach, the age rank is obtained by aggregating a series of binary classification results, where cost sensitivities among the labels are introduced to improve the aggregating performance. In addition, we give a theoretical analysis on designing the cost of individual binary classifier so that the misranking cost can be bounded by the total misclassification costs. An efficient descriptor, scattering transform, which scatters the Gabor coefficients and pooled with Gaussian smoothing in multiple layers, is evaluated for facial feature extraction. We show that this descriptor is a generalization of conventional bioinspired features and is more effective for face-based age inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art age estimation approaches.