# Facial Age Estimation for Age Fraud Detection in National ID Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05638 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05638/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [A General and Adaptive Robust Loss Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03077/) (2017)
- [Rank consistent ordinal regression for neural networks with application to age estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07884/) (2019)
- [Deep Label Distribution Learning with Label Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01731/) (2016)
- [MiVOLO: Multi-input Transformer for Age and Gender Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04616/) (2023)
- [SwinFace: A Multi-task Transformer for Face Recognition, Expression Recognition, Age Estimation and Attribute Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11509/) (2023)
- [RoI Tanh-polar Transformer Network for Face Parsing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02717/) (2021)
- [FP-Age: Leveraging Face Parsing Attention for Facial Age Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11145/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Beyond Specialization: Assessing the Capabilities of MLLMs in Age and Gender Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02302/) (2024)
- [On the effect of age perception biases for real age regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07653/) (2019)
- [Stage-wise Adaptive Label Distribution for Facial Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00450/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Identity fraud during biometric enrollment and updates remains a major challenge for large-scale national identity systems. A common fraud vector is misrepresenting one's age to access age-restricted services or welfare schemes. In this work, we present SwinAge, a facial age estimation system designed for use within the Aadhaar biometric enrollment pipeline, to assist quality-check (QC) operators to flag potential age-related fraud. This is critical for a system like Aadhaar (the world's largest national identity programme), that holds about 1.5 billion unique identities, with 22.4 million new enrollments and 283 million updates in the last year. Building upon the SwinFace architecture with landmark-based similarity (warp affine) alignment, we train on a large in-house dataset of 1.45 million face images and evaluate on an independent, age-stratified test set of 283K images, both drawn from an ethnically diverse population of 716K unique subjects. We investigate three Aadhaar-specific operational thresholds (5, 18, and 60 years) and propose a deployment triage framework that flags suspected cases for manual review. Following NIST FATE, we report false acceptance/rejection rates (FAR/FRR) at each threshold rather than aggregate accuracy: at 1% FAR the model achieves an FRR of 3% (<5yrs), 0.4% (>18yrs) and 11.0% (>60yrs). SwinAge achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.94 years on the same test set, outperforming three zero-shot vision language models on all benchmarks, and improving the state-of-the-art on 5 out of 7 public benchmark datasets. We further report per-gender errors and distill lessons for national identity programs.