Papers › Mean-Variance Loss for Deep Age Estimation From a Face
Mean-Variance Loss for Deep Age Estimation From a Face
Hongyu Pan, Hu Han, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Age estimation has broad application prospects of many fields, such as video surveillance, social networking, and human-computer interaction. However, many of the published age estimation approaches simply treat the age estimation as an exact age regression problem, and thus did not leverage a distribution's robustness in representing labels with ambiguity such as ages. In this paper, we propose a new loss function, called mean-variance loss, for robust age estimation via distribution learning. Specifically, the mean-variance loss consists of a mean loss, which penalizes difference between the mean of the estimated age distribution and the ground-truth age, and a variance loss, which penalizes the variance of the estimated age distribution to ensure a concentrated distribution. The proposed mean-variance loss and softmax loss are embedded jointly into Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for age estimation, and the network weights are optimized via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in an end-to-end learning way. Experimental results on a number of challenging face aging databases (FG-NET, MORPH Album II, and CLAP2016) show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin using a single model.
Code
No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Age Estimation | ChaLearn 2016 | Mean-Variance | e-error | 0.2867 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections