Title: Understanding and Comparing Deep Neural Networks for Age and Gender Classification,
Abstract: Recently, deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performances in
recognizing the age and gender on human face images. However, these models were
applied in a black-box manner with no information provided about which facial
features are actually used for prediction and how these features depend on
image preprocessing, model initialization and architecture choice. We present a
study investigating these different effects.
In detail, our work compares four popular neural network architectures,
studies the effect of pretraining, evaluates the robustness of the considered
alignment preprocessings via cross-method test set swapping and intuitively
visualizes the model's prediction strategies in given preprocessing conditions
using the recent Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) algorithm. Our
evaluations on the challenging Adience benchmark show that suitable parameter
initialization leads to a holistic perception of the input, compensating
artefactual data representations. With a combination of simple preprocessing
steps, we reach state of the art performance in gender recognition.