Understanding and Comparing Deep Neural Networks for Age and Gender Classification
  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.
