Chronological Age Estimation Under the Guidance of Age-Related Facial Attributes

Although the researches of facial attributes' analysis have been launched for decades, the estimation of chronological age attribute remains a big challenge. Previous researchers have found that some facial attributes (e.g., gender and race attributes) have close connections with the age attribute and make age estimation under a specific condition decided by various combinations of those age-related attributes which should be more reasonable. In this paper, we propose a generic framework based on a convolutional neural network, which can consider different conditions for age estimation and jointly output age and age-related facial attributes in the end. Compared with conventional methods, it is more efficient and universal. Besides, we view age estimation as a special multi-class ordinal classification problem and use a losses combination function to optimize the predicted probability distribution of individual age classes. These operations further improve the performance of age estimation. Finally, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on both controlled and wild face datasets.