A smile can reveal your age: enabling facial dynamics in age estimation

Estimation of a person's age from the facial image has many applications, ranging from biometrics and access control to cosmetics and entertainment. Many image-based methods have been proposed for this problem. In this paper, we propose a method for the use of dynamic features in age estimation, and show that 1) the temporal dynamics of facial features can be used to improve image-based age estimation; 2) considered alone, static image-based features are more accurate than dynamic features. We have collected and annotated an extensive database of face videos from 400 subjects with an age range between 8 and 76, which allows us to extensively analyze the relevant aspects of the problem. The proposed system, which fuses facial appearance and expression dynamics, performs with a mean absolute error of 4.81 (4.87) years. This represents a significant improvement of accuracy in comparison to the sole use of appearance-based features.