A Study on Cross-Population Age Estimation

We study the problem of cross-population age estimation. Human aging is determined by the genes and influenced by many factors. Different populations, e.g., males and females, Caucasian and Asian, may age differently. Previous research has discovered the aging difference among different populations, and reported large errors in age estimation when crossing gender and/or ethnicity. In this paper we propose novel methods for cross-population age estimation with a good performance. The proposed methods are based on projecting the different aging patterns into a common space where the aging patterns can be correlated even though they come from different populations. The projections are also discriminative between age classes due to the integration of the classical discriminant analysis technique. Further, we study the amount of data needed in the target population to learn a cross-population age estimator. Finally, we study the feasibility of multi-source cross-population age estimation. Experiments are conducted on a large database of more than 21,000 face images selected from the MORPH. Our studies are valuable to significantly reduce the burden of training data collection for age estimation on a new population, utilizing existing aging patterns even from different populations.