# Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Combating Child Labour: A Real-Time Edge Vision Pipeline for Child Detection and Age Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14770 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14770/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Observation-Centric SORT: Rethinking SORT for Robust Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14360/) (2022)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13514/) (2022)
- [Rank consistent ordinal regression for neural networks with application to age estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07884/) (2019)
- [FairFace: Face Attribute Dataset for Balanced Race, Gender, and Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04913/) (2019)
- [YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25164/) (2025)
- [What is YOLOv8: An In-Depth Exploration of the Internal Features of the Next-Generation Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15857/) (2024)
- [MiVOLO: Multi-input Transformer for Age and Gender Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04616/) (2023)
- [C3AE: Exploring the Limits of Compact Model for Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05059/) (2019)
- [A Call to Reflect on Evaluation Practices for Age Estimation: Comparative Analysis of the State-of-the-Art and a Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04570/) (2023)
- [Ultralytics YOLO Evolution: An Overview of YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, YOLOv8, and YOLOv5 Object Detectors for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09653/) (2025)
- [MPTQ-ViT: Mixed-Precision Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14895/) (2024)
- [Beyond Specialization: Assessing the Capabilities of MLLMs in Age and Gender Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02302/) (2024)
- [CerberusDet: Unified Multi-Dataset Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12632/) (2024)
- [Underage Detection through a Multi-Task and MultiAge Approach for Screening Minors in Unconstrained Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10689/) (2025)
- [Quantizing YOLOv7: A Comprehensive Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04943/) (2024)
- [Enhancing YOLOv11n for Reliable Child Detection in Noisy Surveillance Footage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10592/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An estimated 138 million children remain in child labour worldwide, and the monitoring systems used by affected sectors, built on periodic household visits and interviews, systematically under-detect them. We present a real-time computer-vision pipeline, built and operated solely as a research prototype, that studies the feasibility of giving Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) a continuous, presence-based evidence channel. The pipeline combines a multi-task person and face detector (YOLO26x backbone in the CerberusDet framework), cascaded age estimation pairing MiVOLO v2 with a child-specialist model for ages 0-12, ByteTrack tracking, ArcFace and DINOv2 re-identification, and track-level fusion producing reviewable per-person records. The detector raises person mAP@0.5 from 0.390 to 0.683 over the previous-generation baseline; the child specialist reaches 1.944 years MAE on children-only validation, where widely used open-source stacks err by 18-23 years. FP8 TensorRT compilation yields a 1.77x speedup at +0.002 years MAE, bringing the pipeline above twice real-time on embedded hardware. On 26.8 hours of proxy video the system finds 634 unique child candidates versus 285 for its predecessor. We further report a seventeen-day unattended field pilot on a farm in Zimbabwe (38.7 million frames, six cameras) evaluated against a daily attendance register: software tuning improved detection yield 36-fold, and identity consolidation under a simultaneity veto cut over-reporting from 9.1x to 1.8-3.9x with zero proven-false merges. We document training and quantisation failures alongside successes, and the data-protection and human-in-the-loop safeguards such a system requires.