Effects of facial alignment for age estimation

Age estimation is an important enabling capability for the near future, especially in applications related to Human Computer Interaction. Perhaps due to technical difficulties, age estimation has only recently begun to receive more attention. One of the more important pre-processing steps before age estimation is facial alignment, which spatially transforms a face image to align certain facial features, in order to maximize classification accuracy. However the capability for facial alignment in automated age estimation literature is commonly assumed, and the effects of facial alignment is not addressed, even though it is an important issue especially for live deployment. In this paper, we present, to our knowledge, the results of the first systematic investigation on the effects of facial alignment on age estimation accuracy, and conclude with some directions on further topics of investigation in this area.