Multi-Expert Gender Classification on Age Group by Integrating Deep Neural Networks
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in computer vision for applications like biometrics or demographic analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing multi-task learning and fusion strategies.
The paper tackles the problem of gender classification accuracy being affected by facial age variations by proposing a multi-expert system that integrates deep neural networks for age estimation and gender classification, achieving improved performance with smaller computational cost compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Generally, facial age variations affect gender classification accuracy significantly, because facial shape and skin texture change as they grow old. This requires re-examination on the gender classification system to consider facial age information. In this paper, we propose Multi-expert Gender Classification on Age Group (MGA), an end-to-end multi-task learning schemes of age estimation and gender classification. First, two types of deep neural networks are utilized; Convolutional Appearance Network (CAN) for facial appearance feature and Deep Geometry Network (DGN) for facial geometric feature. Then, CAN and DGN are integrated by the proposed model integration strategy and fine-tuned in order to improve age and gender classification accuracy. The facial images are categorized into one of three age groups (young, adult and elder group) based on their estimated age, and the system makes a gender prediction according to average fusion strategy of three gender classification experts, which are trained to fit gender characteristics of each age group. Rigorous experimental results conducted on the challenging databases suggest that the proposed MGA outperforms several state-of-art researches with smaller computational cost.