A Call to Reflect on Evaluation Practices for Age Estimation: Comparative Analysis of the State-of-the-Art and a Unified Benchmark

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Paplham, Jakub, Franc, Vojtech
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Paplham, Jakub
Franc, Vojtech
author_facet Paplham, Jakub
Franc, Vojtech
contents Comparing different age estimation methods poses a challenge due to the unreliability of published results stemming from inconsistencies in the benchmarking process. Previous studies have reported continuous performance improvements over the past decade using specialized methods; however, our findings challenge these claims. This paper identifies two trivial, yet persistent issues with the currently used evaluation protocol and describes how to resolve them. We offer an extensive comparative analysis for state-of-the-art facial age estimation methods. Surprisingly, we find that the performance differences between the methods are negligible compared to the effect of other factors, such as facial alignment, facial coverage, image resolution, model architecture, or the amount of data used for pretraining. We use the gained insights to propose using FaRL as the backbone model and demonstrate its effectiveness on all public datasets. We make the source code and exact data splits public on GitHub.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_04570
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Call to Reflect on Evaluation Practices for Age Estimation: Comparative Analysis of the State-of-the-Art and a Unified Benchmark
Paplham, Jakub
Franc, Vojtech
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Comparing different age estimation methods poses a challenge due to the unreliability of published results stemming from inconsistencies in the benchmarking process. Previous studies have reported continuous performance improvements over the past decade using specialized methods; however, our findings challenge these claims. This paper identifies two trivial, yet persistent issues with the currently used evaluation protocol and describes how to resolve them. We offer an extensive comparative analysis for state-of-the-art facial age estimation methods. Surprisingly, we find that the performance differences between the methods are negligible compared to the effect of other factors, such as facial alignment, facial coverage, image resolution, model architecture, or the amount of data used for pretraining. We use the gained insights to propose using FaRL as the backbone model and demonstrate its effectiveness on all public datasets. We make the source code and exact data splits public on GitHub.
title A Call to Reflect on Evaluation Practices for Age Estimation: Comparative Analysis of the State-of-the-Art and a Unified Benchmark
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04570