Demographic Estimation from Face Images: Human vs. Machine Performance

Demographic estimation entails automatic estimation of age, gender and race of a person from his face image, which has many potential applications ranging from forensics to social media. Automatic demographic estimation, particularly age estimation, remains a challenging problem because persons belonging to the same demographic group can be vastly different in their facial appearances due to intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In this paper, we present a generic framework for automatic demographic (age, gender and race) estimation. Given a face image, we first extract demographic informative features via a boosting algorithm, and then employ a hierarchical approach consisting of between-group classification, and within-group regression. Quality assessment is also developed to identify low-quality face images that are difficult to obtain reliable demographic estimates. Experimental results on a diverse set of face image databases, FG-NET (1K images), FERET (3K images), MORPH II (75K images), PCSO (100K images), and a subset of LFW (4K images), show that the proposed approach has superior performance compared to the state of the art. Finally, we use crowdsourcing to study the human perception ability of estimating demographics from face images. A side-by-side comparison of the demographic estimates from crowdsourced data and the proposed algorithm provides a number of insights into this challenging problem.