Multifeature Anisotropic Orthogonal Gaussian Process for Automatic Age Estimation.

Automatic age estimation is an important yet challenging problem. It has many promising applications in social media. Of the existing age estimation algorithms, the personalized approaches are among the most popular ones. However, most person-specific approaches rely heavily on the availability of training images across different ages for a single subject, which is usually difficult to satisfy in practical application of age estimation. To address this limitation, we first propose a new model called Orthogonal Gaussian Process (OGP), which is not restricted by the number of training samples per person. In addition, without sacrifice of discriminative power, OGP is much more computationally efficient than the standard Gaussian Process. Based on OGP, we then develop an effective age estimation approach, namely anisotropic OGP (A-OGP), to further reduce the estimation error. A-OGP is based on an anisotropic noise level learning scheme that contributes to better age estimation performance. To finally optimize the performance of age estimation, we propose a multifeature A-OGP fusion framework that uses multiple features combined with a random sampling method in the feature space. Extensive experiments on several public domain face aging datasets (FG-NET, MORPH Album1, and MORPH Album 2) are conducted to demonstrate the state-of-the-art estimation accuracy of our new algorithms.