Automatic age estimation based on facial images is important but challenging in face recognition research. An improved NMF (Non negative Matrix Factorization) algorithm was proposed to implement the age estimation of facial images

which employs linear discriminative analysis in the features derived from NMF

keeps down the base images that have the best discriminate ability to form a new subspace. Then

after projecting the whole training sets images to the obtained subspace

the RBF neural networks was used to extract the aging information contained in most facial images to estimate age information. Finally

experimental results demonstrate that it is an effective method.