DeepFaces: Advancing Age and Gender Classification using Facial Images with Deep Features

In the realm of identity recognition and social interactions, human facial features play a pivotal role. Accurate age estimation and gender classification from facial images have practical implications across various fields, including biometrics, surveillance, and personalized services. This study presents a novel approach that harnesses deep features extracted by the VGG-19 architecture for age and gender prediction, employing a custom convolutional neural network (CNN) for classification. Leveraging the UTKFace dataset, encompassing a diverse collection of facial images with annotated age and gender labels spanning various ages, ethnicities, and gender representations, provides a robust foundation for model training and evaluation. Deep features extracted from the VGG-19 architecture serve as rich representations of facial patterns, enabling our model to discern discriminative cues for age and gender. These deep features are input to CNN model, which is fine-tuned specifically for age and gender classification. The model comprises input layer, Dense layers, incorporating dropout and batch normalization to mitigate overfitting, and Activation Functions Sigmoid for gender classification and SoftMax for Age group classification. The dataset is dividedinto training and validation sets (70% and 30%, respectively), enabling the model to learn to map VGG-19 features to age and gender labels. To evaluate the performance of the model, metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score are employed. The proposed model achieves an impressive 78.67% accuracy in predicting age and 97.02% accuracy in gender classification on the UTKFace dataset, outperforming traditional methods despite challenges posed by variations in lighting, pose, and expression. The robustness of our approach is evidenced by its capability to handle diverse gender representations.