Age estimation through facial images using Deep CNN Pretrained Model and Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

There has been a lot of recent study on age estimates utilizing different optimization techniques, architecture models, and diverse strategies with some variations. However, accuracy improvement in age estimation studies remains a challenge due to the inability of traditional approaches to effectively capture complex facial features and variations. Therefore, this study investigates the usage of Particle Swarm Optimization in Deep CNN models to improve accuracy. The focus of the study is on exploring different feature extractors for the age estimation task, utilizing pre-trained CNN models such as VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, and Xception. The proposed approach utilizes PSO to optimize the hyperparameters of a custom output layer for age detection in regression. The PSO algorithm searches for the optimal combination of model hyperparameters that minimize the age estimation error. This study shows that fine-tuning a model can lead to improvements in its performance, with the VGG19 model achieving the best performance after fine-tuning. Additionally, the PSO process was able to find sets of hyperparameters that were on par or even better than the initial hyperparameters. The best result can be seen in VGG19 architecture with loss of 86.181, MAE of 6.693, and MAPE of 38.462. Out of the twelve experiments conducted, it was observed that the utilization of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) offered distinct advantages in terms of achieving better results for age estimation. However, it is important to note that the execution time for these experiments was considerably longer when employing PSO.