A Recursive Binary Tree Method for Age Classification of Child Faces

This paper proposes an intuitive approach to facial age classification on child faces – a recursive multi-class binary classification tree – using the texture information obtained from facial images. The face area is divided into small regions from which Local Binary Pattern (LBP) histograms were extracted and concatenated into a single vector efficiently representing a facial image. The classification is based on training a set of binary classifiers using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Each classifier estimates whether the facial image belongs to a specified age range or not until the last level of the tree is reached where the age is finally determined. Our classification approach also includes an overlapping function that resolves overlaps and conflicts in the outputs of two mutually-exclusive classifiers at each level of the classification tree. Our proposed approach was experimented on a publicly available dataset (FG-NET) and our locally obtained dataset (FAGE) and the results obtained are at par with those of existing works.