New Software Guesses a Person's (Apparent) Age

Oct. 14, 2008 -- They say it's not how old you are, but how old you feel. With new age recognition software, it's actually how old you look.

Developed at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, computer software could analyze an image of your face to verify your identity or run a commercial that would appeal to your, ah, level of life experience.

"Age measurement is very difficult," said Thomas Huang, the lead developer. "If you use the face to estimate age we can really get the apparent age, or how old a person looks."

The researchers trained their computer algorithm using 1,600 different people with five pictures of each person, for a total of 8,000 images. The age of the people in the pictures ranged from one year to 93 years old.

Huang didn't tell the computer what to look for. The computer searched the faces and used its own software to determine which features best determined the person's apparent age.

Related Content:

One feature the computer looked at was gray scale. If, for instance, the face in the picture measured 100 pixels by 100 pixels, all 10,000 separate pixels has its own level of gray (no color yet). By comparing how dark or how light each pixel was compared to other pixels, the software estimates the apparent age of the individual.

"A woman wearing makeup should get a younger age," said Huang. "A smoother skin texture will register as younger-looking."

The computer also looked at the shape of the face. The relative positions of the eyes, nose, ears, the shape of the mouth, all change over time and can help indicate a person's age.

"If you use the real age as the 'ground truth', then the accuracy is quite low," said Huang. "But if we estimate [a person's age] to within 10 years, then the accuracy is about 80 percent."

Shape, position, color and texture don't just reveal age. They also give away ethnicity, gender, even emotions, all of which Huang is studying with computer software.