Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) - Performance of Automated Age Estimation Algorithms

Published

March 20, 2014

Author(s)

Mei L. Ngan, Patrick J. Grother

Abstract

Facial Age Estimation is an area of study new to the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Still Track. While peripheral to traditional face recognition, it has become a growing area of research given its potential use in commercial and biometric applications. The motivation for age estimation systems has grown in the last few decades given the rise of the digital age and the increase in human- computer interaction. Age-based access control and verification, age-adaptive targeted mar- keting, age-invariant person identification, and age-based indexing of face images are potential applications of automated facial age estimation. NIST performed a large scale empirical evaluation of facial age estimation algorithms, with participation from five com- mercial providers and one university, with three large operational datasets comprised of visa images and law enforcement mughots, leveraging a combined corpus of over 7 million images. Core age estimation accuracy was baselined over a large homogeneous population, then assessed demographically by age group, gender, and ethnicity. The impact of input- driven variations, namely image quality and number of image samples were captured, and assessments of age-verification accuracy and estimation accuracy in children were documented.

Citation

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR) - 7995

Report Number

7995

NIST Pub Series

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.7995

Keywords

age estimation, biometrics, facial recognition

Citation

Ngan, M. and Grother, P. (2014), Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) - Performance of Automated Age Estimation Algorithms, NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.7995 (Accessed May 8, 2026)

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