Volume 11, Number 6

Facial Age Estimation using Transfer Learning and Bayesian Optimization based on Gender Information

  Authors

Marwa Ahmed¹ and Serestina Viriri², ¹Sudan University of Science and Technology, Sudan, ²University of KwaZulu-Nata, South Africa

  Abstract

Age estimation of unrestricted imaging circumstances has attracted an augmented recognition as it is appropriate in several real-world applications such as surveillance, face recognition, age synthesis, access control, and electronic customer relationship management. Current deep learning-based methods have displayed encouraging performance in age estimation field. Males and Females have a variable type of appearance aging pattern; this results in age differently. This fact leads to assuming that using gender information may improve the age estimator performance. We have proposed a novel model based on Gender Classification. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to get Gender Information, then Bayesian Optimization is applied to this pre-trained CNN when fine-tuned for age estimation task. Bayesian Optimization reduces the classification error on the validation set for the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments are done to assess our proposed model on two data sets: FERET and FG-NET. The experiments’ result indicates that using a pre-trained CNN containing Gender Information with Bayesian Optimization outperforms the state of the arts on FERET and FG-NET data sets with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1.2 and 2.67 respectively.

  Keywords

Age estimation, Gender information, Deep learning, Convolutional Neural Network, and Bayesian Optimization.