Automatic age estimation based on facial images is an important research trend of face recognition. Here we proposed an independent component analysis method based on winner-take-all（WTA）rule to realize the age estimation task. Firstly

applying the PCA method to reduce the dimensions of original training data; then

using the proposed WTA-ICA coefficient sparse description method to extract the feature.Finally

the experimental results on the FG-NET Aging database indicate that the proposed method can estimate peoples age based on the face images well.