Reliable Age and Gender Estimation from Face Images: Stating the Confidence of Model Predictions

Automated age and gender estimation became of great importance for many potential applications ranging from forensics to social media. Although previous works reported high increased performances, these solutions tend to mispredict under challenging conditions or when the trained model faces a sample that was underrepresented in the training data. In this work, we propose an age and gender estimation model, as well as a novel reliability measure to quantify the confidence of the model's prediction. Our solution is based on stochastic forward passes through dropout-reduced neural networks that were theoretically proven to approximate Gaussian processes. By utilizing multiple stochastic forward passes, the centrality and dispersion of these predictions are used to derive a confidence statement about the prediction. Experiments were conducted on the Adience benchmark. We showed that the proposed solution reached and exceeded state-ofthe-art performance. Further, we demonstrated that the proposed reliability measure correlates with the prediction performance and thus, is highly successful in quantifying the prediction reliability.