Age and Gender Estimation based on Wrinkle Texture
and Color of Facial Images
Jun- ichiro Hayashi' Mamoru YASUMOTO' Hideaki ITO+ and Hiroyasu KOSHIMIZU'
+: SCCS, Chu!qm University, JAPAN *: HOIP, Sofiopia Japan and JST
t: (jun@koshi-lab.. itoh@, hiroyasu@}sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp *:yasu@sofiopia.pr~~g~u.jp
Abstract
We are researching about an age and gender esrinn-
rion based on wrinkle rerlure and color of facio1 imriges.
Preliminary quesrionnaire (enyuere) examination hou
ejfectively the facial imoges could br usedfor gender and
age estinmtions was executed by using 300 different faces
and 21 examinees. Wrinkles appeured in rhe face and rhe
shripe and size of the,fiicialparts are selected 10model the
uge and gender estimurion in this yesearch basing on this
enquure. Basing on this preliminal consideration, an im-
uge processing algorithm f o r w i n k l e modeling was pro-
posed i n this paper. In addirion, U merhod for making
relationships between firciul imuges and their keywords
W N S proposed by using [he larenr semiintic indexing. An
efflcienr interface for displrrying rhe Felurionships among
kr,vwords ond f i x i o l imirgei has been introduced wirh
ZDl3Dfeoture spuce defined by rhe indexing.
1. Introduction
A salesclerk is always estimating the age and gender of
the customer in order to make clear the relationship be-
tween the goods and customer's attributes, and inputs
them into a register at the shopping counter of the conven-
ience store. It is necessary also in PICASSO system for
facial caricaturing to estimate the age and gender of the
model especially to choose a suitable mean face [I]. This
estimation should hopefully be realized from the appear-
ance o f t h e face not from the direct interview [ 2 ] .
In our research, we focus on the study of facial wrin-
kles for the estimation of age and gender. I t is widely
known that wrinkles increase and are deepen with age.
Therefore, we can assume that, compared to other facial
features, it would be easy to estimate the relationship
between wrinkles and age. In references p], the authors
were analyzing the relationship between age and gender
in facial skin. And in reference p]. the authors were
studying ways of gender recognition using genetic algo-
rithms. We have tried to develop a system of estimating
age and gender by extracting wrinkles and determining
their f o r n .
1051-465llO2$17.000 2002 IEEE
In addition, since keywords such as "looks wild" and
"seems feminine" characterize the total impression to the
faces, we proposed a method for making the relationship
between facial images and their keywords by using the
latent semantic indexing. An efficient interface for face
retrieval has been introduced with feature space defined
by the number ofsingular values.
In Chapter 2 , we executed a preliminary questionnaire
experiment how effectively facial images could be util-
ized for gender and age estimation by human. In Chapter
3, we give an outline of the caricature generation system
PICASSO. In Chapter 4, we describe an algorithm for
extracting wrinkles and its results. In Chapter 5, we show
our scheme for age and gender estimation. And in Chap-
ter 6, we explain a supplemental application example for
introducing an efficient intcrface for face retrieval by
keywords. Finally, in Chapter 7, we give our conclusion
and outline of our future subjects.
2. Age and gender estimation by human
We made an empirical experiment to estimate age and
gender from a person's appearance, behavior, speech, etc.
Especially the information from human faces seems to be
most effective for the estimation. In order to exa mine how
facial information can contribute to the estimation o f age
and gender, we carried out psychological questionnaire
experiments to give a background of the estimation by
means of facial image processing.
We used our own face database for the experiment.
The face database consists of 150 Japanese men and 150
Japanese women whose age are distributed from 15 to 64.
The number of the subjects in every age period of five
years is ten for male and female respectively. We made
two stimulus sets A and B from the database. Set A was a
normal portrait and set B was an edited facial image that
did not include both hair and clothes. Fig. 1 shows an
example of the stimulus images. The estimators were
thirteen men and eight women with normal eyesight. All
of them were Japanese. We instructed them to classify the
300 cards of the stimulus set into 20 subclasses by esti-
mating either male or female and which period of five
years from 15 to 64 year old. The classification proce-
405
dures were done in the order of set B and set A . The corre- 4. Algorithm for wrinkle extraction
lation coefficient rgA between true gender and estimated
gender for set A was 0.990 and r,B for set B was 0.928.
r,Xwas Pearson mmentcorrelation in s e t X The correb- 4.1. Skin extraction
tion coefficientrJ between true age period and estimated
age period for set A was 0.906 and r,B for set B was We used a facial data of 300 persons "HOIP-FACE-
0.880. Although the results obtained from set B were DB[6]. The images with 24bit color and VGA in size
slightly lower than those from set A , they indicate that were taken in a controlled circumstance. The total number
very high correlations exist between human estimations of these data is300, which are covering from 15 years old
and the facts. This suggests that the facial image process- to 64 years old, and both of mab and female.
ing applied
~ .~ to the facial k g e s without hair could be First, we extract a skin region by using color image.
potent to esti ge an Here we used HSV color table p]. To put it concrete, let
the color transform system be e.q. (3) and a hue image,
saturation image and value image are generated.
Next, we extract a skin region, which satisfies e.q.(4).
This equation was defined by analysing statistics from the
training facial images. Fig. 3 ( a K c ) shows an input i~
age. We applied skin extraction to other races such as
s e t A(with hair) set B(without hair) black and white too. Fig. 4 (a)-(c) shows a result of skin
Fig. 1. Stimulus image used 'in questionnaire. extraction.
H = tan-'(C, / C , )
3. PICASSO overview
for age and gender estimation S = J m (3)
V=0.3R+0.59G+O.llB
The facial caricaturing system PICASSO [I] uses the C, = R - Y = 0.7R - 0.59G - 0. I I5
difference between input face and mean face to extract an C 2 = B - Y = 4 . 3 R -0.59G + 0.898
individual's facial features and creates an exaggerated
LowerTh. 4KIhColofl HieherTh. id)
caricature. The age and gender of the input face should be
determined automatically and used to select a suitable
mean face. PICASSO caricatures were used in the a-
periment on how effectively the faces give us information
to discriminate age and gender [ 5 ] .
Let us introduce the term " mean face" which is de-
fined by e.q. (I).
Feature points (x,G',yp'Hi = I , 2, ..., 331) give the facial Fig. 3. Input image (In the case of skin color).
description of thej-th person under examination, and M is
the number of persons in a group of samples. A caricature
Qcan be represented by e.q. (2). Pis the "input face", S is
the "mean face", and b is the "exaggeration factor". Fig. 2
shows an outline ofcaricature generation.
(a) yellow (b) black (c) white
Fig. 4. Output image of skin extraction.

4.2. Wrinkle enhancement

Next step, we make a histogram from skin extraction

image in Section 4.1 and emphasize wrinkles by using
histogram equalization [8].
First of all, we make a density histogram h(d) From
skin region. Secondly, we make an accumulated histo-
gram H(d), and then the image is converted so that H(d)
becomes linear. Fig. 5 shows the results of the empha-
sized wrinkles. It was clear that wrinkles are emphasized
P : inwt face S. mean face 0. t a b l u r e in these results. A brow became high in contrasr in Fig.
Fig. 2. PICASSO system overview (Dr. Chomsly). W).

406

fbl Fia" 31bl IIC ,) Fia.
l a ) Fia.3fa) I , " 3 ~,
ld
5.
\ I
Flg. Output image with emphasized wrinkle
(Comparing with Fig.3).
4.3. Wrinkle modelling
Wrinkles were extracted from the contrast-enhanced
images by using an image processing procedure consisted
of noise reduction, edge detection, thinning, and finally
Hough transform. We used a special Hough transform,
DTHT(Digita1 Template Hough Transform) [9], to extract
both shorter and longer wrinkles on the face. Fig. 6 show
5. Estimation of age and gender
For the estimation of the age and gender using wrin-
kles, it is necessary to delete segments of the contours of
facial parts from the segments detected by Hough trans-
f o r m And it is expected to introduce a look up table
LUT's for corresponding the state of the wrinkles and the
appearancesof age and gender.
We estimate age using a LUT that provides the rela-
tionship between the feature vector and gender andlor age.
First of all, we extract the contours of facial parts auto-
matically. It is very difficult to extract all facial parts
correctly. But in reference [IO], a nose and a mouth E-
gions were extracted around 86-95% using pattern match-
ing leaded by this iris recognition. For making LUT, we
use "HOIP-FACE-DB. First, wrinkles are extracted for
each 5 years old. At the same time, we generate a mean
face using PICASSO system. Next, the common wrinkles
of each year are nserted to the respective mean face o f
the .age by using Affine transform. Then, LUT for age
401
estimation is constructed by integrating the wrinkle distri-
bution and the knowledge given by the questionnaire
experiments.
In gender.estimation, since i is generally difficult to
extract wrinkles from the €male's faces around 20-30
years, which are covered with make-up processing, auxil-
iary features such as the smoothness of the face contour
are introduced. For example, a ratio between the sizes of
face contour and of facial parts is quite different among
male and female.
And by investigating the caricatures of PICASSO sys-
tem, the facial contour of female is smoother than that of
male. And we noted the difficulty in extracting wrinkles in
20 - 30 years old female. Therefore it is expectable to esti-
mate gender at first followed by the age estimation. Details
ofthe experiments are being collected.
We made a preliminal experiment to estimate gender
and age, which compares an input face with the proto-
types of the average face data in advance. Each average
face is calculated from the faces in the class of the same
gender and the same five-year period of age. The input
face is estimated as belonging to the class whose average
face gives the minimum distance to the input face. k-
periments with the "HOIP-FACE-DB" showed that our
proposed method could achieve hitting ratios of approxi-
mately 83% and 27% for gender and age respectively.
Fig. 7 show an outline of the method for estimating age
lllMdld.11.".*.1
Fig. 7. A method for age and gender estimation.
6. Support tool for feature design
Meeting someone, we recognize hisiher face, at first.
The imaginations andior impressions which are inspired
with their faces are symbolized in termsiwords. After that,
images of faces and terms are united, and they are related
t o each other suitably. For example, if some man has
glasses and he is fair-complexioned face, and oval-faced,
then his face is characterized by the keywords "glasses", "
fair-complexioned", and "oval-faced", etc. Such physical
characters should be assigned to faces as their keywords.
The method for making relationships between the key-
words and the faces is expected also in age and gender
estimation. As one of such methods, the latent semantic
indexing is popular [I I].
 Let some keywords be assigned t o each object, i.e., the
picture of a face. The set of the object and its keywards is
called an object description. Fig.8 shows an example of
the object description. From a set of object descriptions,
term frequent matrix T is constructed. The TOWS and the
columns a e corresponding to keywords and objects, le-
spectively. This keywords frequent matrix T is d e c o m
posed into three matrixes by applying the latent semantic
indexing, which are keyword matrix K, singular tm-
trix Z, and face matrix F. Supposing the threshold value
with respect to singular values, the dimensions of these
three matrices are reduced. As the result, T can be ex-
pressed by T = K X T = K'I: 'T. Here, K , Z ' and T' are
reduced matrices. Although the value of the threshold is
decided depending on the captured singular values in
general, we decide it for convenience to show the space
which is constructed by the latent semantic indexing.
We have been makmg an experiment in applying the
latent semantic indexing to twenty object descriptions. A s
this result, in Fig. 8, two-dimensional space is obtained by
reducing the dimension. The interface has been develop-
ing, which shows the space in two-dimensional space. It
show the examples of the spaces which consist o f key-
words and faces in 2D, respectively. Nodes are corre-
sponding to the keywords. For example, nodes "%" and
k' are keywords "male" and "female". Interrelation-
ships between the keywords and the descriptions became
clear. Since the keywords are divided into two classes, it
seems that keywords which can assign to males or %-
males could be found. Moreover, the objects are divided
into two classes, which are images of males and females.
There is a case m which the interface for 2 D is not
sufficient for showing relationships among the keywords
and the objects due to piled nodes. For being able to
investigate the space from several viewpoints, 3D space
representation is also prepared.
7. Conclusions and future works
We described a method for extracting wrinkles using
facial image processing, and a new scheme for age and
gender estimation. Prior to this, we conducted a question-
naire examination how effectively the facial image be
utilized for age and gender estimation.
In the process of skin extraction, we got robust results
by means of histogram equalization processing. And in
the process of wrinkle detection, we got stable results by
using Hough transform. Since this experiment was con-
ducted by using facial image o f Japanese, w e must m-
force the experiments by using the faces from all over the
world. In the case of female, it is very difficult in age
estimation. In the future, we plan to add new factors such
a s the shape features of the facial parts in addition to the
wrinkles. Concerning to the support tool for feature de-
408
sign, it is expected to augment more different keywords
and the numbe if faces.
a
.
J
keywords: i Ian, glasses, delightful iudgy-neck)
Fig. 8. A re1 ! i o n s h i p between fat 11 image and
keywords.
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