A Computational Face Alignment Method for Improved Facial Age Estimation

Facial age estimation has increasingly gained attention in the Computer Vision and Image Processing research community due to its numerous applications in several domains. Thus, research efforts are still on to improve facial age estimation accuracy. One of the ways to improve facial age estimation is to strengthen the associated preprocessing stages, two of which are face detection and face alignment. In this paper, a computational method of aligning the face prior to facial age estimation is proposed. Without any form of learning, the proposed face alignment method uses trigonometric and set operations to align a given facial image and to enhance the face detection process prior to age estimation. The impact of the proposed face alignment method on facial age estimation was evaluated via experiments on two publicly available facial ageing datasets FG-NET and Lifespan datasets.