The Role of Color and Contrast in Facial Age Estimation

Computer based methods for facial age estimation can be improved by incorporating experimental findings from human psychophysics. Moreover, the latter can be used in creating systems that are not necessarily more accurate in age estimation, but strongly resemble human age estimations. In this paper we investigate the perceptual hypothesis that contrast is a useful cue for estimating age from facial appearance. Using an extensive evaluation paradigm, we establish that using a perceptual color space improves computer's age estimation, and more importantly, using contrast-enabled features results in estimations that are more correlated to human estimations.