Sensitivity of Age Estimation Systems to Demographic Factors and Image Quality: Achievements and Challenges

Recently, impressively growing efforts have been devoted to the challenging task of facial age estimation. The improvements in performance achieved by new algorithms are measured on several benchmarking test databases with different characteristics to check on consistency. While this is a valuable methodology in itself, a significant issue in the most age estimation related studies is that the reported results lack an assessment of intrinsic system uncertainty. Hence, a more in-depth view is required to examine the robustness of age estimation systems in different scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an evaluative and comparative analysis of different age estimation systems to identify trends, as well as the points of their critical vulnerability. In particular, we investigate four age estimation systems, including the online Microsoft service, two best state-of-the-art approaches advocated in the literature, as well as a novel age estimation algorithm. We analyse the effect of different internal and external factors, including gender, ethnicity, expression, makeup, illumination conditions, quality and resolution of the face images, on the performance of these age estimation systems. The goal of this sensitivity analysis is to provide the biometrics community with the insight and understanding of the critical subject-, camera- and environmental-based factors that affect the overall performance of the age estimation system under study.