Deep Conditional Distribution Learning for Age Estimation

Age estimation is a challenging task not only because face appearance is affected by illumination, pose, and expression, but also because there exists age label ambiguity among different demographic groups. In this work, we first revisit different label distribution learning (LDL) based age estimation methods and propose a more general formulation, which can unify individual LDL-based age estimation methods, as well as the traditional regression, classification, and ranking based age estimation methods. Based on such a general formulation, we propose a novel deep conditional distribution learning (DCDL) method, which can flexibly leverage a varying number of auxiliary face attributes to achieve adaptive age-related feature learning and improve age estimation robustness against the challenges above. Experimental results on multiple age estimation datasets (MORPH II, AgeDB, FG-NET, MegaAge-Asian, CLAP2016, UTK-Face, and LFW+) show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art age estimation methods by a large margin. In addition, the proposed approach can generalize well to other human attributes estimation tasks, like height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) estimation.