Directional Age-Primitive Pattern (DAPP) for Human Age Group Recognition and Age Estimation

Abstract

An appropriate aging description from face image is the prime influential factor in human age recognition, but still there is an absence of a specially engineered aging descriptor, which can characterize discernible facial aging cues (e.g., craniofacial growth, skin aging) from a detailed and more finer point of view. To address this issue, we propose a local face descriptor, directional age-primitive pattern (DAPP), which inherits discernible aging cue information and is functionally more robust and discriminative than existing local descriptors. We introduce three attributes for coding the DAPP description. First, we introduce Age-Primitives encoding aging related to the most crucial texture primitives, yielding a reasonable and clear aging definition. Second, we introduce an encoding concept dubbed as Latent Secondary Direction, which preserves compact structural information in the code avoiding uncertain codes. Third, a globally adaptive thresholding mechanism is initiated to facilitate more discrimination in a flat and textured region. We apply DAPP on separate age group recognition and age estimation tasks. Applying the same approach to both of these tasks is seldom explored in the literature. Carefully conducted experiments show that the proposed DAPP description outperforms the existing approaches by an acceptable margin.