Feature fusion via Deep Random Forest for facial age estimation

In the last few years, human age estimation from face images attracted the attention of many researchers in computer vision and machine learning fields. This is due to its numerous applications. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for age estimation based on facial images. It is mainly based on a cascade of classification trees ensembles, which are known recently as a Deep Random Forest. Our architecture is composed of two types of DRF. The first type extends and enhances the feature representation of a given facial descriptor. The second type operates on the fused form of all enhanced representations in order to provide a prediction for the age while taking into account the fuzziness property of the human age. While the proposed methodology is able to work with all kinds of image features, the face descriptors adopted in this work used off-the-shelf deep features allowing to retain both the rich deep features and the powerful enhancement and decision provided by the proposed architecture. Experiments conducted on six public databases prove the superiority of the proposed architecture over other state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.