# PatchBMI-Net: Lightweight Facial Patch-based Ensemble for BMI Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18102 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18102/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [An Overview of Neural Network Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03669/) (2020)
- [An Examination of Bias of Facial Analysis based BMI Prediction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10262/) (2022)
- [Face-to-BMI: Using Computer Vision to Infer Body Mass Index on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03156/) (2017)
- [Estimation of BMI from Facial Images using Semantic Segmentation based Region-Aware Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04733/) (2021)
- [AI-based BMI Inference from Facial Images: An Application to Weight Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07442/) (2020)
- [Compact CNN Models for On-device Ocular-based User Recognition in Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04953/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to an alarming trend related to obesity affecting 93.3 million adults in the United States alone, body mass index (BMI) and body weight have drawn significant interest in various health monitoring applications. Consequently, several studies have proposed self-diagnostic facial image-based BMI prediction methods for healthy weight monitoring. These methods have mostly used convolutional neural network (CNN) based regression baselines, such as VGG19, ResNet50, and Efficient-NetB0, for BMI prediction from facial images. However, the high computational requirement of these heavy-weight CNN models limits their deployment to resource-constrained mobile devices, thus deterring weight monitoring using smartphones. This paper aims to develop a lightweight facial patch-based ensemble (PatchBMI-Net) for BMI prediction to facilitate the deployment and weight monitoring using smartphones. Extensive experiments on BMI-annotated facial image datasets suggest that our proposed PatchBMI-Net model can obtain Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in the range [3.58, 6.51] with a size of about 3.3 million parameters. On cross-comparison with heavyweight models, such as ResNet-50 and Xception, trained for BMI prediction from facial images, our proposed PatchBMI-Net obtains equivalent MAE along with the model size reduction of about 5.4x and the average inference time reduction of about 3x when deployed on Apple-14 smartphone. Thus, demonstrating performance efficiency as well as low latency for on-device deployment and weight monitoring using smartphone applications.