Perceived age estimation under lighting condition change by covariate shift adaptation

Over the recent years, a great deal of effort has been made to age estimation from face images. It has been reported that age can be accurately estimated under controlled environment such as frontal faces, no expression, and static lighting conditions. However, it is not straightforward to achieve the same accuracy level in real-world environment because of considerable variations in camera settings, facial poses, and illumination conditions. In this paper, we apply a recently-proposed machine learning technique called covariate shift adaptation to alleviating lighting condition change between laboratory and practical environment. Through real-world age estimation experiments, we demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed method.