Title
Similarity-Aware and Variational Deep Adversarial Learning for Robust Facial Age Estimation
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a similarity-aware deep adversarial learning (SADAL) approach for facial age estimation. Instead of making full access to the limited training samples which likely leads to bias age prediction, our SADAL aims to seek batches of unobserved hard-negative samples based on existing training samples, which typically reinforces the discriminativeness of the learned feature representation for facial ages. Motivated by the fact that age labels are usually correlated in real-world scenarios, we carefully develop a similarity-aware function to well measure the distance of each face pair based on the age value gaps. Consequently, the age-difference information is exploited in the synthetic feature space for robust age estimation. During the learning process, we jointly optimize both procedures of generating hard negatives and learning discriminative age ranker via a sequence of adversarial-game iterations. Another major issue lies on that existing methods only enforce the indiscriminativeness within each class, which is probably trapped into model overfitting and thus the generation capacity is limited particularly on unseen age classes with many individuals. To circumvent this problem, we propose a variational deep adversarial learning (VDAL) paradigm, which learns to encode each face sample in two factorized parts, i.e., the intra-class variance distribution and the intra-class invariant class center. Moreover, our VDAL principally optimizes the variational confidence lower bound on the variational factorized feature representation. To better enhance the discriminativeness of the age representation, our VDAL further learns to encode the ordinal relationship among age labels in the reconstructed subspace. Experimental results on folds of widely-evaluated benchmarking datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves promising performance in contrast to most state-of-the-art age estimation methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TMM.2020.2969793
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Estimation,Training,Face,Aging,Measurement,Generators,Convergence
Journal
22
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
7
1520-9210
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hao Liu111310.67
Penghui Sun210.35
Jiaqiang Zhang310.68
Suping Wu423.09
Zhenhua Yu512.37
Xuehong Sun632.74