How old are you???

A software being developed by the University of Illinois can tell your age fairly accurately by looking at your face.The advantage of age-recognition algorithms is that could stop underage drinkers from entering bars, prevent minors from purchasing tobacco products from vending machines, and deny access of children to adult Web sites.

Estimating someone's age is not an easy task, even for a computer. That's partly because the ageing process is determined not only by a person's genetic makeup but by many other factors as well, including helath, location and living conditions

Human faces do convey a significant amount of information, however, and provide important visual cues for estimating age. Facial attributes, such as expression, gender and ethnic origin, play a crucial role in our image analysis.

Consisting of three modules : face detection, discriminative manifold learning, and multiple linear regression ,the researchers' age-estimation software was trained on a database containing photos of 1,600 faces. In addition to performing tasks such as security control and surveillance monitoring, age-estimation software also could be used for electronic customer relationship management.

young vs old