Show me your face and I will tell you your height, weight and body mass index

Abstract

Body height, weight, as well as the associated and composite body mass index (BMI) are human attributes of pertinence due to their use in a number of applications including surveillance, re-identification, image retrieval systems, as well as healthcare. Previous work on automated estimation of height, weight and BMI has predominantly focused on 2D and 3D full-body images and videos. Little attention has been given to the use of face for estimating such traits. Motivated by the above, we here explore the possibility of estimating height, weight and BMI from single-shot facial images by proposing a regression method based on the 50-layers ResNet-architecture. In addition, we present a novel dataset consisting of 1026 subjects and show results, which suggest that facial images contain discriminatory information pertaining to height, weight and BMI, comparable to that of body-images and videos. Finally, we perform a gender-based analysis of the prediction of height, weight and BMI.