Age estimation via fusion of multiple binary age grouping systems

In this paper, we propose a new divide-and-conquer based method, called fusion of multiple binary age-grouping-estimation systems, for human facial age estimation. Under a specific constraint, such as a given facial feature or classification/regression method, what is the better framework for age estimation? First we employ multiple binary-grouping systems for age group classification. Each face image will be classified into one of the two groups. Within the two groups, two models are trained to estimate ages for the faces classified into their groups, respectively. We also investigate the effect of different age grouping systems on the performance of age grouping accuracy and age estimation error. In the last stage, we propose a sequentially selection algorithm to fuse some of the binary-grouping systems to get a final age estimation result. Experiments on the MORPH2 database demonstrate our framework for age estimation can achieve satisfying results and outperform other state-of-the-art age estimation approaches.