Local Deep Neural Networks for Age and Gender Classification

Local deep neural networks have been recently introduced for gender recognition. Although, they achieve very good performance they are very computationally expensive to train. In this work, we introduce a simplified version of local deep neural networks which significantly reduces the training time. Instead of using hundreds of patches per image, as suggested by the original method, we propose to use 9 overlapping patches per image which cover the entire face region. This results in a much reduced training time, since just 9 patches are extracted per image instead of hundreds, at the expense of a slightly reduced performance. We tested the proposed modified local deep neural networks approach on the LFW and Adience databases for the task of gender and age classification. For both tasks and both databases the performance is up to 1% lower compared to the original version of the algorithm. We have also investigated which patches are more discriminative for age and gender classification. It turns out that the mouth and eyes regions are useful for age classification, whereas just the eye region is useful for gender classification.