Face Image Age Estimation Based on Data Augmentation and Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network

• Published in: Symmetry (Basel) Vol. 12; no. 1; p. 146
• Main Authors: Liu, Xinhua, Zou, Yao, Kuang, Hailan, Ma, Xiaolin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.01.2020
• Subjects: Accuracy; Age; age estimation; Aging; Algorithms; Artificial intelligence; Artificial neural networks; Biometrics; Chronology; Classification; cnn; Computer terminals; Data augmentation; Datasets; Deep learning; Electronic devices; Facial recognition technology; Feature extraction; Gender; Lightweight; Machine learning; Neural networks; Object recognition; Principal components analysis; regression; Storage capacity; Support vector machines; Teaching methods
• ISSN: 2073-8994; 2073-8994
• DOI: 10.3390/sym12010146

Face images contain many important biological characteristics. The research directions of face images mainly include face age estimation, gender judgment, and facial expression recognition. Taking face age estimation as an example, the estimation of face age images through algorithms can be widely used in the fields of biometrics, intelligent monitoring, human-computer interaction, and personalized services. With the rapid development of computer technology, the processing speed of electronic devices has greatly increased, and the storage capacity has been greatly increased, allowing deep learning to dominate the field of artificial intelligence. Traditional age estimation methods first design features manually, then extract features, and perform age estimation. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) in deep learning have incomparable advantages in processing image features. Practice has proven that the accuracy of using convolutional neural networks to estimate the age of face images is far superior to traditional methods. However, as neural networks are designed to be deeper, and networks are becoming larger and more complex, this makes it difficult to deploy models on mobile terminals. Based on a lightweight convolutional neural network, an improved ShuffleNetV2 network based on the mixed attention mechanism (MA-SFV2: Mixed Attention-ShuffleNetV2) is proposed in this paper by transforming the output layer, merging classification and regression age estimation methods, and highlighting important features by preprocessing images and data augmentation methods. The influence of noise vectors such as the environmental information unrelated to faces in the image is reduced, so that the final age estimation accuracy can be comparable to the state-of-the-art.