年龄信息作为人体的一种重要生物特征,在安全监控、人机交互、视频检索等领域有着巨大的应用潜力,并且是人脸识别技术的主要瓶颈问题之一。基于人脸图像的年龄估计技术作为一种新兴的生物特征识别技术,目前已经成为计算机视觉、人机交互等领域的一个重要研究课题。为此对国内外近几年来在年龄估计技术方面的发展情况进行了综述,主要包括年龄特征提取与年龄分类模式两大部分。同时对常用的年龄数据库、性能评价指标进行了总结,并在此基础上对当前的一些年龄估计系统的性能进行了对比。最后,对基于人脸图像的年龄估计技术所面临的挑战以及可能的发展方向进行了讨论。

Age information,as an important personal trait,has great potential in safety surveillance,human-computer interaction,multimedia applications,and face recognition.As an emerging biometric information identification technology,face-image based age estimation has gained great attention resently and has become one of the important research topics in machine learning and computer vision.In this paper,we survey most existing commonly used methods in face-image based age estimation,especially focusing on the extraction of age features and classification.Then,we also introduce some face aging databases and evaluation protocols,which are widely used at present.Based on these databases and evaluation methods,a comparison of the performances of several age estimation systems is presented.Finally,the challenges and promising directions of age estimation techniques are discussed.