A hybrid deep learning CNN–ELM for age and gender classification

Exploration of MPSO-Two-Stage Classification Optimization Model for Scene Images with Low Quality and Complex Semantics

Currently, complex scene classification strategies are limited to high-definition image scene sets, and low-quality scene sets are overlooked. Although a few studies have focused on artificially noisy images or specific image sets, none have involved actual low-resolution scene images. Therefore, designing classification models around practicality is of paramount importance. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a two-stage classification optimization algorithm model based on MPSO, thus achieving high-precision classification of low-quality scene images. Firstly, to verify the rationality of the proposed model, three groups of internationally recognized scene datasets were used to conduct comparative experiments with the proposed model and 21 existing methods. It was found that the proposed model performs better, especially in the 15-scene dataset, with 1.54% higher accuracy than the best existing method ResNet-ELM. Secondly, to prove the necessity of the pre-reconstruction stage of the proposed model, the same classification architecture was used to conduct comparative experiments between the proposed reconstruction method and six existing preprocessing methods on the seven self-built low-quality news scene frames. The results show that the proposed model has a higher improvement rate for outdoor scenes. Finally, to test the application potential of the proposed model in outdoor environments, an adaptive test experiment was conducted on the two self-built scene sets affected by lighting and weather. The results indicate that the proposed model is suitable for weather-affected scene classification, with an average accuracy improvement of 1.42%.

A New Benchmark for Consumer Visual Tracking and Apparent Demographic Estimation from RGB and Thermal Images

Visual tracking and attribute estimation related to age or gender information of multiple person entities in a scene are mature research topics with the advent of deep learning techniques. However, when it comes to indoor images such as video sequences of retail consumers, data are not always adequate or accurate enough to essentially train effective models for consumer detection and tracking under various adverse factors. This in turn affects the quality of recognizing age or gender for those detected instances. In this work, we introduce two novel datasets: Consumers comprises 145 video sequences compliant to personal information regulations as far as facial images are concerned and BID is a set of cropped body images from each sequence that can be used for numerous computer vision tasks. We also propose an end-to-end framework which comprises CNNs as object detectors, LSTMs for motion forecasting of the tracklet association component in a sequence, along with a multi-attribute classification model for apparent demographic estimation of the detected outputs, aiming to capture useful metadata of consumer product preferences. Obtained results on tracking and age/gender prediction are promising with respect to reference systems while they indicate the proposed model's potential for practical consumer metadata extraction.

Gender Recognition Based on Gradual and Ensemble Learning from Multi-View Gait Energy Images and Poses

Image-based gender classification is very useful in many applications, such as intelligent surveillance, micromarketing, etc. One common approach is to adopt a machine learning algorithm to recognize the gender class of the captured subject based on spatio-temporal gait features extracted from the image. The image input can be generated from the video of the walking cycle, e.g., gait energy image (GEI). Recognition accuracy depends on the similarity of intra-class GEIs, as well as the dissimilarity of inter-class GEIs. However, we observe that, at some viewing angles, the GEIs of both gender classes are very similar. Moreover, the GEI does not exhibit a clear appearance of posture. We postulate that distinctive postures of the walking cycle can provide additional and valuable information for gender classification. This paper proposes a gender classification framework that exploits multiple inputs of the GEI and the characteristic poses of the walking cycle. The proposed framework is a cascade network that is capable of gradually learning the gait features from images acquired in multiple views. The cascade network contains a feature extractor and gender classifier. The multi-stream feature extractor network is trained to extract features from the multiple input images. Features are then fed to the classifier network, which is trained with ensemble learning. We evaluate and compare the performance of our proposed framework with state-of-the-art gait-based gender classification methods on benchmark datasets. The proposed framework outperforms other methods that only utilize a single input of the GEI or pose.

A Hybrid Deep Transfer Learning Model With Kernel Metric for COVID-19 Pneumonia Classification Using Chest CT Images

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) as a new pneumonia which is extremely infectious, the classification of this coronavirus is essential to effectively control the development of the epidemic. Pathological changes in the chest computed tomography (CT) scans are often used as one of the diagnostic criteria of COVID-19. Meanwhile, deep learning-based transfer learning is currently an effective strategy for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). To further improve the performance of deep transfer learning model used for COVID-19 classification with CT images, in this article, we propose a hybrid model combined with a semi-supervised domain adaption model and extreme learning machine (ELM) classifier, and the application of a novel multikernel correntropy induced loss function in transfer learning is also presented. The proposed model is evaluated on open-source datasets. The experimental results are compared to some baseline models to verify the effectiveness, while adopting accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score and area under curve (AUC) as the evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the performance of original model and is more suitable for CT images analysis.

LimitAccess: on-device TinyML based robust speech recognition and age classification

Automakers from Honda to Lamborghini are incorporating voice interaction technology into their vehicles to improve the user experience and offer value-added services. Speech recognition systems are a key component of smart cars, enhancing convenience and safety for drivers and passengers. In the future, safety-critical features may rely on speech recognition, but this raises concerns about children accessing such services. To address this issue, the LimitAccess system is proposed, which uses TinyML for age classification and helps parents limit children’s access to critical speech recognition services. This study employs a lite convolutional neural network (CNN) model for two different reasons: First, CNN showed superior accuracy compared to other audio classification models for age classification problems. Second, the lite model will be integrated into a microcontroller to meet its limited resource requirements. To train and evaluate our model, we created a dataset that included child and adult voices of the keyword “open”. The system approach categorizes voices into age groups (child, adult) and then utilizes that categorization to grant access to a car. The robustness of the model was enhanced by adding a new class (recordings) to the dataset, which enabled our system to detect replay and synthetic voice attacks. If an adult voice is detected, access to start the car will be granted. However, if a child’s voice or a recording is detected, the system will display a warning message that educates the child about the dangers and consequences of the improper use of a car. Arduino Nano 33 BLE sensing was our embedded device of choice for integrating our trained, optimized model. Our system achieved an overall F1 score of 87.7% and 85.89% accuracy. LimitAccess detected replay and synthetic voice attacks with an 88% F1 score.

A novel genetic-artificial neural network based age estimation system

Age estimation is the ability to predict the age of an individual based on facial clues. This could be put to practical use in underage voting detection, underage driving detection, and overage sportsmen detection. To date, no popular automatic age estimation system has been developed to target black faces. This study developed a novel age estimation system from the combination of a genetic algorithm and a back propagation (BP)-trained artificial neural network (ANN) and using the local binary pattern feature extraction technique (LBGANN) targeted at black faces. The system was trained with a predominantly black face database, and the result was compared against that of a standard ANN system (LBANN). The results showed that the developed system LBGANN outperformed the LBANN in terms of the correct classification rate.

Apparent age prediction from faces: A survey of modern approaches

Apparent age estimation via human face image has attracted increased attention due to its numerous real-world applications. Predicting the apparent age has been quite difficult for machines and humans. However, researchers have focused on machine estimation of "age as perceived" to a high level of accuracy. To further improve the performance of apparent age estimation from the facial image, researchers continue to examine different methods to enhance its results further. This paper presents a critical review of the modern approaches and techniques for the apparent age estimation task. We also present a comparative analysis of the performance of some of those approaches on the apparent facial aging benchmark. The study also highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each approach used for apparent age estimation to guide in choosing the appropriate algorithms for future work in the field. The work focuses on the most popular algorithms and those that appear to have been the most successful for apparent age estimation to improve on the existing state-of-the-art results. We based our evaluations on three facial aging datasets, including looking at people (LAP)-2015, LAP-2016, and APPA-REAL, the most popular and publicly available datasets benchmark for apparent age estimation.

Boosting Archimedes optimization algorithm using trigonometric operators based on feature selection for facial analysis

Due to technical advancements and the proliferation of mobile applications, facial analysis (FA) of humans has recently become an important area for computer vision research. FA investigates a variety of difficulties, including gender recognition, facial expression recognition, age and race recognition, with the goal of automatically comprehending social interactions. Due to the dimensional challenge posed by pre-trained CNN networks, the scientific community has developed numerous techniques inspired by biology, swarm intelligence theory, physics, and mathematical rules. This article presents a gender recognition system based on scAOA, that is a modified version of the Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA). The latest variant (scAOA) enhances the exploitation stage by using trigonometric operators inspired by the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) in order to prevent local optima and to accelerate the convergence. The main purpose of this paper is to apply scAOA to select the relevant deep features provided by two pretrained models of CNN (AlexNet & ResNet) to recognize the gender of a human person categorized into two classes (men and women). Two datasets are used to evaluate the proposed approach (scAOA): the Brazilian FEI dataset and the Georgia Tech Face dataset (GT). In terms of accuracy, Fscore and statistical test, the comparison analysis demonstrates that scAOA outperforms other modern and competitive optimizers such as AOA, SCA, Ant lion optimizer (ALO), Salp swarm algorithm (SSA), Grey wolf optimizer (GWO), Simple genetic algorithm (SGA), Grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) and Particle swarm optimizer (PSO).

Review: Single attribute and multi attribute facial gender and age estimation

Facial age and gender recognition have vital applications as consumer profile prediction, social media advertisement, human-computer interaction, image retrieval system, demographic profiling, customized advertisement systems, security and surveillance. This paper presents a study on Single Attribute (Attribute: either Gender or Age) and Multi-Attribute (both Gender and Age) prediction model. We present a review for facial age estimation and gender classification methods based on conventional as well as deep learning approaches developed so far with analysis of their pros, cons and insights for future research. Moreover, this study also enlists the databases used for benchmarking results with their properties for both constrained and unconstrained environment.

ICRL: Using landmark ratios with cascade model for an accurate age estimation system using deep neural networks

Over the past decade, the computer vision community has given increased attention to the development of age estimation systems. Several approaches to more accurate and robust facial age estimation have been introduced. Apparent age datasets are typically collected from uncontrolled environments, leading to a number of challenges. In this paper, a cascade model system, which we called the ‘Integrated Classification and Regression with Landmark Ratios (ICRL), is introduced. Our system uses a classification model in order to learn the age label distribution, then uses this knowledge as an auxiliary input to a regression model. ICRL is based on context facial information and label distribution analysis. Facial context information is introduced through the extraction of precise facial landmark ratios. Extracted landmark ratios allow the system to distinguish each age label. The ICRL system uses a classification model to train the CNN network to learn the in-between relation of age labels. ICRL sufficiently models the aging process in the form of ordered and continuous imagery. The ICRL system minimizes the number of parameters needed as well as overall computational costs whilst maintaining robust and accurate results. Despite its simplicity, our system has outperformed other state-of-the-art approaches when applied onto the MORPH II, CLAP2015, AFAD and UTKFace datasets. ICRL achieved an overall superior predictive performance, reaching 99.67% with MORPH II, 99.51% with AFAD, 96.52 with CLAP2015, and 96.28% with UTKFace.

A Hierarchical Approach toward Prediction of Human Biological Age from Masked Facial Image Leveraging Deep Learning Techniques

The lifestyle of humans has changed noticeably since the contagious COVID-19 disease struck globally. People should wear a face mask as a protective measure to curb the spread of the contagious disease. Consequently, real-world applications (i.e., electronic customer relationship management) dealing with human ages extracted from face images must migrate to a robust system proficient to estimate the age of a person wearing a face mask. In this paper, we proposed a hierarchical age estimation model from masked facial images in a group-to-specific manner rather than a single regression model because age progression across different age groups is quite dissimilar. Our intention was to squeeze the feature space among limited age classes so that the model could fairly discern age. We generated a synthetic masked face image dataset over the IMDB-WIKI face image dataset to train and validate our proposed model due to the absence of a benchmark masked face image dataset with real age annotations. We somewhat mitigated the data sparsity problem of the large public IMDB-WIKI dataset using off-the-shelf down-sampling and up-sampling techniques as required. The age estimation task was fully modeled like a deep classification problem, and expected ages were formulated from SoftMax probabilities. We performed a classification task by deploying multiple low-memory and higher-accuracy-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our proposed hierarchical framework demonstrated marginal improvement in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) compared to the one-off model approach for masked face real age estimation. Moreover, this research is perhaps the maiden attempt to estimate the real age of a person from his/her masked face image.

Face Image Analysis Using Machine Learning: A Survey on Recent Trends and Applications

Human face image analysis using machine learning is an important element in computer vision. The human face image conveys information such as age, gender, identity, emotion, race, and attractiveness to both human and computer systems. Over the last ten years, face analysis methods using machine learning have received immense attention due to their diverse applications in various tasks. Although several methods have been reported in the last ten years, face image analysis still represents a complicated challenge, particularly for images obtained from ’in the wild’ conditions. This survey paper presents a comprehensive review focusing on methods in both controlled and uncontrolled conditions. Our work illustrates both merits and demerits of each method previously proposed, starting from seminal works on face image analysis and ending with the latest ideas exploiting deep learning frameworks. We show a comparison of the performance of the previous methods on standard datasets and also present some promising future directions on the topic.

An Intelligent handcrafted feature selection using Archimedes optimization algorithm for facial analysis

Human facial analysis (HFA) has recently become an attractive topic for computer vision research due to technological progress and mobile applications. HFA explores several issues as gender recognition (GR), facial expression, age, and race recognition for automatically understanding social life. This study explores HFA from the angle of recognizing a person’s gender from their face. Several hard challenges are provoked, such as illumination, occlusion, facial emotions, quality, and angle of capture by cameras, making gender recognition more difficult for machines. The Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA) was recently designed as a metaheuristic-based population optimization method, inspired by the Archimedes theory’s physical notion. Compared to other swarm algorithms in the realm of optimization, this method promotes a good balance between exploration and exploitation. The convergence area is increased By incorporating extra data into the solution, such as volume and density. Because of the preceding benefits of AOA and the fact that it has not been used to choose the best area of the face, we propose utilizing a wrapper feature selection technique, which is a real motivation in the field of computer vision and machine learning. The paper’s primary purpose is to automatically determine the optimal face area using AOA to recognize the gender of a human person categorized by two classes (Men and women). In this paper, the facial image is divided into several subregions (blocks), where each area provides a vector of characteristics using one method from handcrafted techniques as the local binary pattern (LBP), histogram-oriented gradient (HOG), or gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). Two experiments assess the proposed method (AOA): The first employs two benchmarking datasets: the Georgia Tech Face dataset (GT) and the Brazilian FEI dataset. The second experiment represents a more challenging large dataset that uses Gallagher’s uncontrolled dataset. The experimental results show the good performance of AOA compared to other recent and competitive optimizers for all datasets. In terms of accuracy, the AOA-based LBP outperforms the state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with 96.08% for the Gallagher’s dataset.

Automatic Ethnicity Classification from Middle Part of the Face Using Convolutional Neural Networks

In the field of face biometrics, finding the identity of a person in an image is most researched, but there are other, soft biometric information that are equally as important, such as age, gender, ethnicity or emotion. Nowadays, ethnicity classification has a wide application area and is a prolific area of research. This paper gives an overview of recent advances in ethnicity classification with focus on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and proposes a new ethnicity classification method using only the middle part of the face and CNN. The paper also compares the differences in results of CNN with and without plotted landmarks. The proposed model was tested using holdout testing method on UTKFace dataset and FairFace dataset. The accuracy of the model was 80.34% for classification into five classes and 61.74% for classification into seven classes, which is slightly better than state-of-the-art, but it is also important to note that results in this paper are obtained by using only the middle part of the face which reduces the time and resources necessary.

A Survey of Human Gait-Based Artificial Intelligence Applications

We performed an electronic database search of published works from 2012 to mid-2021 that focus on human gait studies and apply machine learning techniques. We identified six key applications of machine learning using gait data: 1) Gait analysis where analyzing techniques and certain biomechanical analysis factors are improved by utilizing artificial intelligence algorithms, 2) Health and Wellness, with applications in gait monitoring for abnormal gait detection, recognition of human activities, fall detection and sports performance, 3) Human Pose Tracking using one-person or multi-person tracking and localization systems such as OpenPose, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), etc., 4) Gait-based biometrics with applications in person identification, authentication, and re-identification as well as gender and age recognition 5) “Smart gait” applications ranging from smart socks, shoes, and other wearables to smart homes and smart retail stores that incorporate continuous monitoring and control systems and 6) Animation that reconstructs human motion utilizing gait data, simulation and machine learning techniques. Our goal is to provide a single broad-based survey of the applications of machine learning technology in gait analysis and identify future areas of potential study and growth. We discuss the machine learning techniques that have been used with a focus on the tasks they perform, the problems they attempt to solve, and the trade-offs they navigate.

Potential Fault Diagnosis Method and Classification Accuracy Detection of IGBT Device Based on Improved Single Hidden Layer Feedforward Neural Network

Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) is a high-power switch in the field of power electronics. Its reliability is closely related to system stability. Once failure occurs, it may cause irreparable loss. Therefore, potential fault diagnosis methods of IGBT devices are studied in this paper, and their classification accuracy is tested. Due to the shortcomings of incomplete data application in the traditional method of characterizing the device state based on point frequency parameters, a fault diagnosis method based on full frequency threshold screening was proposed in this paper, and its classification accuracy was detected by the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) algorithm. The randomly generated input layer weight ω and hidden layer deviation lead to the change of output layer weight β and then affect the overall output result. In view of the errors and instability caused by this randomness, an improved Finite Impulse Response Filter ELM (FIR-ELM) training algorithm is proposed. The filtering technique is used to initialize the input weights of the Single Hidden Layer Feedforward Neural Network (SLFN). The hidden layer of SLFN is used as the preprocessor to achieve the minimum output error. To reduce the structural risk and empirical risk of SLFN, the simulation results of 300 groups of spectral data show that the improved FIR-ELM algorithm significantly improves the training accuracy and has good robustness compared with the traditional extreme learning machine algorithm.

Classification of Benign and Malignant Pulmonary Nodules Using a Regularized Extreme Learning Machine

An L1/L2-norm-bound extreme learning machine classification algorithm is proposed to improve the accuracy of distinguishing between benign and malignant pulmonary nodules. In this algorithm, features extracted from the segmented lung nodule using the histogram of oriented gradients method are used as inputs. L1-norm can promote sparsity in the weights of the output layer, and L2-norm can smooth output weights. The combination of the L1 norm and L2 norm can simplify the complexity of the network and prevent overfitting to improve classification accuracy. For each newly tested lung nodule, the algorithm outputs a class label of either benign or malignant. The accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity reached 94.12%, 93%, and 95% respectively over the lung image database consortium and image database resource initiative dataset. Compared with other algorithms, the average values of the three metrics increased by 6.5%, 7.94%, and 4.32%, respectively. An accuracy score of 95.83% can be achieved over a set of 120 urinary sediment images. Therefore, this algorithm has a good classification effect of pulmonary nodules.

Deep Learning Based Real Age and Gender Estimation from Unconstrained Face Image towards Smart Store Customer Relationship Management

The COVID-19 pandemic markedly changed the human shopping nature, necessitating a contactless shopping system to curb the spread of the contagious disease efficiently. Consequently, a customer opts for a store where it is possible to avoid physical contacts and shorten the shopping process with extended services such as personalized product recommendations. Automatic age and gender estimation of a customer in a smart store strongly benefit the consumer by providing personalized advertisement and product recommendation; similarly, it aids the smart store proprietor to promote sales and develop an inventory perpetually for the future retail. In our paper, we propose a deep learning-founded enterprise solution for smart store customer relationship management (CRM), which allows us to predict the age and gender from a customer’s face image taken in an unconstrained environment to facilitate the smart store’s extended services, as it is expected for a modern venture. For the age estimation problem, we mitigate the data sparsity problem of the large public IMDB-WIKI dataset by image enhancement from another dataset and perform data augmentation as required. We handle our classification tasks utilizing an empirically leading pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN), the VGG-16 network, and incorporate batch normalization. Especially, the age estimation task is posed as a deep classification problem followed by a multinomial logistic regression first-moment refinement. We validate our system for two standard benchmarks, one for each task, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for both real age and gender estimation.

Integrated Multi-Model Face Shape and Eye Attributes Identification for Hair Style and Eyelashes Recommendation

Identifying human face shape and eye attributes is the first and most vital process before applying for the right hairstyle and eyelashes extension. The aim of this research work includes the development of a decision support program to constitute an aid system that analyses eye and face features automatically based on the image taken from a user. The system suggests a suitable recommendation of eyelashes type and hairstyle based on the automatic reported users’ eye and face features. To achieve the aim, we develop a multi-model system comprising three separate models; each model targeted a different task, including; face shape classification, eye attribute identification and gender detection model. Face shape classification system has been designed based on the development of a hybrid framework of handcrafting and learned feature. Eye attributes have been identified by exploiting the geometrical eye measurements using the detected eye landmarks. Gender identification system has been realised and designed by implementing a deep learning-based approach. The outputs of three developed models are merged to design a decision support system for haircut and eyelash extension recommendation. The obtained detection results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively identifies the face shape and eye attributes. Developing such computer-aided systems is suitable and beneficial for the user and would be beneficial to the beauty industrial.

Coming to Grips with Age Prediction on Imbalanced Multimodal Community Question Answering Data

For almost every online service, it is fundamental to understand patterns, differences and trends revealed by age demographic analysis—for example, take the discovery of malicious activity, including identity theft, violation of community guidelines and fake profiles. In the particular case of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! Answers, user demographics have impacts on their revenues and user experience; demographics assist in ensuring that the needs of each cohort are fulfilled via personalizing and contextualizing content. Despite the fact that technology has been made more accessible, thereby becoming evermore prevalent in both personal and professional lives alike, older people continue to trail Gen Z and Millennials in its adoption. This trailing brings about an under-representation that has a harmful influence on the demographic analysis and on supervised machine learning models. To that end, this paper pioneers attempts at examining this and other major challenges facing three distinct modalities when dealing with community question answering (cQA) platforms (i.e., texts, images and metadata). As for textual inputs, we propose an age-batched greedy curriculum learning (AGCL) approach to lessen the effects of their inherent class imbalances. When built on top of FastText shallow neural networks, AGCL achieved an increase of ca. 4% in macro-F1-score with respect to baseline systems (i.e., off-the-shelf deep neural networks). With regard to metadata, our experiments show that random forest classifiers significantly improve their performance when individuals close to generational borders are excluded (up to 20% more accuracy); and by experimenting with neural network-based visual classifiers, we discovered that images are the most challenging modality for age prediction. In fact, it is hard for a visual inspection to connect profile pictures with age cohorts, and there are considerable differences in their group distributions with respect to meta-data and textual inputs. All in all, we envisage that our findings will be highly relevant as guidelines for constructing assorted multimodal supervised models for automatic age recognition across cQA platforms.

Joint prediction and time estimation of COVID-19 developing severe symptoms using chest CT scan

With the rapidly worldwide spread of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), it is of great importance to conduct early diagnosis of COVID-19 and predict the conversion time that patients possibly convert to the severe stage, for designing effective treatment plans and reducing the clinicians' workloads. In this study, we propose a joint classification and regression method to determine whether the patient would develop severe symptoms in the later time formulated as a classification task, and if yes, the conversion time will be predicted formulated as a classification task. To do this, the proposed method takes into account 1) the weight for each sample to reduce the outliers' influence and explore the problem of imbalance classification, and 2) the weight for each feature via a sparsity regularization term to remove the redundant features of the high-dimensional data and learn the shared information across two tasks, i.e., the classification and the regression. To our knowledge, this study is the first work to jointly predict the disease progression and the conversion time, which could help clinicians to deal with the potential severe cases in time or even save the patients' lives. Experimental analysis was conducted on a real data set from two hospitals with 408 chest computed tomography (CT) scans. Results show that our method achieves the best classification (e.g., 85.91% of accuracy) and regression (e.g., 0.462 of the correlation coefficient) performance, compared to all comparison methods. Moreover, our proposed method yields 76.97% of accuracy for predicting the severe cases, 0.524 of the correlation coefficient, and 0.55 days difference for the conversion time.

Face Gender Recognition in the Wild: An Extensive Performance Comparison of Deep-Learned, Hand-Crafted, and Fused Features with Deep and Traditional Models

Face gender recognition has many useful applications in human–robot interactions as it can improve the overall user experience. Support vector machines (SVM) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used successfully in this domain. Researchers have shown an increased interest in comparing and combining different feature extraction paradigms, including deep-learned features, hand-crafted features, and the fusion of both features. Related research in face gender recognition has been mostly restricted to limited comparisons of the deep-learned and fused features with the CNN model or only deep-learned features with the CNN and SVM models. In this work, we perform a comprehensive comparative study to analyze the classification performance of two widely used learning models (i.e., CNN and SVM), when they are combined with seven features that include hand-crafted, deep-learned, and fused features. The experiments were performed using two challenging unconstrained datasets, namely, Adience and Labeled Faces in the Wild. Further, we used T-tests to assess the statistical significance of the differences in performances with respect to the accuracy, f-score, and area under the curve. Our results proved that SVMs showed best performance with fused features, whereas CNN showed the best performance with deep-learned features. CNN outperformed SVM significantly at p < 0.05.

Deep Wide Spatial-Temporal Based Transformer Networks Modeling for the Next Destination According to the Taxi Driver Behavior Prediction

This paper uses a neural network approach transformer of taxi driver behavior to predict the next destination with geographical factors. The problem of predicting the next destination is a well-studied application of human mobility, for reducing traffic congestion and optimizing the electronic dispatching system’s performance. According to the Intelligent Transport System (ITS), this kind of task is usually modeled as a multi-class problem. We propose the novel model Deep Wide Spatial-Temporal-Based Transformer Networks (DWSTTNs). In our approach, the encoder and decoder are the transformer’s primary units; with the help of Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN), we encode the geographical information based on visited semantic locations. In particular, we trained our model for the exact longitude and latitude coordinates to predict the next destination. The benefit in the real world of this kind of research is to reduce the customer waiting time for a ride and driver waiting time to pick up a customer. Taxi companies can also optimize their management to improve their company’s service, while urban transport planner can use this information to better plan the urban traffic. We conducted extensive experiments on two real-word datasets, Porto and Manhattan, and the performance was improved compared to the previous models.

A Hybrid Deep Learning Model and Comparison for Wind Power Forecasting Considering Temporal-Spatial Feature Extraction

The inherent intermittency and uncertainty of wind power have brought challenges in accurate wind power output forecasting, which also cause tricky problems in the integration of wind power to the grid. In this paper, a hybrid deep learning model bidirectional long short term memory-convolutional neural network (BiLSTM-CNN) is proposed for short-term wind power forecasting. First, the grey correlation analysis is utilized to select the inputs for forecasting model; Then, the proposed hybrid model extracts multi-dimension features of inputs to predict the wind power from the temporal-spatial perspective, where the Bi-LSTM model is utilized to mine the bidirectional temporal characteristics while the convolution and pooling operations of CNN are utilized to extract the spatial characteristics from multiple input time series. Lastly, a case study is conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed model. Other deep learning models (Bi-LSTM, LSTM, CNN, LSTM-CNN, CNN-BiLSTM, CNN-LSTM) are also simulated to conduct comparison from three aspects. The results show that the BiLSTM-CNN model has the best accuracy with the lowest RMSE of 2.5492, MSE of 6.4984, MAE of 1.7344 and highest R2 of 0.9929. CNN has the fastest speed with an average computational time of 0.0741s. The hybrid model that mines the spatial feature based on the extracted temporal feature has a better performance than the model mines the temporal feature based on the extracted spatial feature.

Using Convolutional Neural Networks Based on a Taguchi Method for Face Gender Recognition

In general, a convolutional neural network (CNN) consists of one or more convolutional layers, pooling layers, and fully connected layers. Most designers adopt a trial-and-error method to select CNN parameters. In this study, an AlexNet network with optimized parameters is proposed for face image recognition. A Taguchi method is used for selecting preliminary factors and experiments are performed through orthogonal table design. The proposed method filters out factors that are significantly affected. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed Taguchi-based AlexNet network obtains 87.056% and 98.72% average accuracy of image gender recognition in the CIA and MORPH databases, respectively. In addition, the average accuracy of the proposed Taguchi-based AlexNet network is 1.576% and 3.47% higher than that of the original AlexNet network in CIA and MORPH databases, respectively.

Video Stream Gender Classification Using Shallow CNN

This paper describes the investigation results about the usage of shallow (limited by few layers only) convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to solve the video-based gender classification problem. Different architectures of shallow CNN are proposed, trained and tested using balanced and unbalanced static image datasets. The influence of diverse voting over confidences methods, applied for frame-by-frame gender classification of the video stream, is investigated for possible enhancement of the classification accuracy. The possibility of the grouping of shallow networks into ensembles is investigated; it has been shown that the accuracy may be more improved with the further voting of separate shallow CNN classification results inside an ensemble over a single frame or different ones.

Deeply Learned Classifiers for Age and Gender Predictions of Unfiltered Faces

Age and gender predictions of unfiltered faces classify unconstrained real-world facial images into predefined age and gender. Significant improvements have been made in this research area due to its usefulness in intelligent real-world applications. However, the traditional methods on the unfiltered benchmarks show their incompetency to handle large degrees of variations in those unconstrained images. More recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based methods have been extensively used for the classification task due to their excellent performance in facial analysis. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end CNN approach, to achieve robust age group and gender classification of unfiltered real-world faces. The two-level CNN architecture includes feature extraction and classification itself. The feature extraction extracts feature corresponding to age and gender, while the classification classifies the face images to the correct age group and gender. Particularly, we address the large variations in the unfiltered real-world faces with a robust image preprocessing algorithm that prepares and processes those faces before being fed into the CNN model. Technically, our network is pretrained on an IMDb-WIKI with noisy labels and then fine-tuned on MORPH-II and finally on the training set of the OIU-Adience (original) dataset. The experimental results, when analyzed for classification accuracy on the same OIU-Adience benchmark, show that our model obtains the state-of-the-art performance in both age group and gender classification. It improves over the best-reported results by 16.6% (exact accuracy) and 3.2% (one-off accuracy) for age group classification and also there is an improvement of 3.0% (exact accuracy) for gender classification.

Classification of Covid-19 Coronavirus, Pneumonia and Healthy Lungs in CT Scans Using Q-Deformed Entropy and Deep Learning Features

Many health systems over the world have collapsed due to limited capacity and a dramatic increase of suspected COVID-19 cases. What has emerged is the need for finding an efficient, quick and accurate method to mitigate the overloading of radiologists' efforts to diagnose the suspected cases. This study presents the combination of deep learning of extracted features with the Q-deformed entropy handcrafted features for discriminating between COVID-19 coronavirus, pneumonia and healthy computed tomography (CT) lung scans. In this study, pre-processing is used to reduce the effect of intensity variations between CT slices. Then histogram thresholding is used to isolate the background of the CT lung scan. Each CT lung scan undergoes a feature extraction which involves deep learning and a Q-deformed entropy algorithm. The obtained features are classified using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network classifier. Subsequently, combining all extracted features significantly improves the performance of the LSTM network to precisely discriminate between COVID-19, pneumonia and healthy cases. The maximum achieved accuracy for classifying the collected dataset comprising 321 patients is 99.68%.

Human Gender Classification Using Transfer Learning via Pareto Frontier CNN Networks

Human gender is deemed as a prime demographic trait due to its various usage in the practical domain. Human gender classification in an unconstrained environment is a sophisticated task due to large variations in the image scenarios. Due to the multifariousness of internet images, the classification accuracy suffers from traditional machine learning methods. The aim of this research is to streamline the gender classification process using the transfer learning concept. This research proposes a framework that performs automatic gender classification in unconstrained internet images deploying Pareto frontier deep learning networks; GoogleNet, SqueezeNet, and ResNet50. We analyze the experiment with three different Pareto frontier Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models pre-trained on ImageNet. The massive experiments demonstrate that the performance of the Pareto frontier CNN networks is remarkable in the unconstrained internet image dataset as well as in the frontal images that pave the way to developing an automatic gender classification system.

A Multi-Task Framework for Facial Attributes Classification through End-to-End Face Parsing and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Human face image analysis is an active research area within computer vision. In this paper we propose a framework for face image analysis, addressing three challenging problems of race, age, and gender recognition through face parsing. We manually labeled face images for training an end-to-end face parsing model through Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. The deep learning-based segmentation model parses a face image into seven dense classes. We use the probabilistic classification method and created probability maps for each face class. The probability maps are used as feature descriptors. We trained another Convolutional Neural Network model by extracting features from probability maps of the corresponding class for each demographic task (race, age, and gender). We perform extensive experiments on state-of-the-art datasets and obtained much better results as compared to previous results.