Improving Juvenile Age Estimation Based on Facial Landmark Points and Gravity Moment

• Main Authors: Ebenezer Nii Ayi Hammond, Shijie Zhou, Hongrong Cheng, Qihe Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-09-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: age estimation; AAM; juvenile detection; information retrieval; ordinal relationship
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/18/6227

Facial age estimation is of interest due to its potential to be applied in many real-life situations. However, recent age estimation efforts do not consider juveniles. Consequently, we introduce a juvenile age detection scheme called LaGMO, which focuses on the juvenile aging cues of facial shape and appearance. LaGMO is a combination of facial landmark points and Term Frequency Inverse Gravity Moment (TF-IGM). Inspired by the formation of words from morphemes, we obtained facial appearance features comprising facial shape and wrinkle texture and represented them as terms that described the age of the face. By leveraging the implicit ordinal relationship between the frequencies of the terms in the face, TF-IGM was used to compute the weights of the terms. From these weights, we built a matrix that corresponds to the possibilities of the face belonging to the age. Next, we reduced the reference matrix according to the juvenile age range (0–17 years) and avoided the exhaustive search through the entire training set. LaGMO detects the age by the projection of an unlabeled face image onto the reference matrix; the value of the projection depicts the higher probability of the image belonging to the age. With Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 89% on the Face and Gesture Recognition Research Network (FG-NET) dataset, our proposal demonstrated superior performance in juvenile age estimation.