EGroupNet: A Feature-enhanced Network for Age Estimation with Novel Age Group Schemes

Although age estimation is easily affected by smiling, race, gender, and other age-related attributes, most of the researchers did not pay attention to the correlations among these attributes. Moreover, many researchers perform age estimation from a wide range of age; however, conducting an age prediction over a narrow age range may achieve better results. This article proposes a hierarchic approach referred to as EGroupNet for age prediction. The method includes two main stages, i.e., feature enhancement via excavating the correlations among age-related attributes and age estimation based on different age group schemes. First, we apply the multi-task learning model to learn multiple face attributes simultaneously to obtain discriminative features of different attributes. Second, we project the outputs of fully connected layers of several subnetworks into a highly correlated matrix space via the correlation learning process. Third, we classify these enhanced features into narrow age groups using two Extreme Learning Machine models. Finally, we make predictions based on the results of the age groups mergence. We conduct a large number of experiments on MORPH-II, LAP-2016 dataset, and Adience benchmark. The mean absolute errors of the two different settings on MORPH-II are 2.48 and 2.13 years, respectively; the normal score (e) on the LAP-2016 dataset is 0.3578; and the accuracy of age prediction on Adience benchmark is 0.6978.