Most existing works regarding facial demographic estimation are focused on still image datasets, although nowadays the need to analyze video content in real applications is increasing. We propose to tackle gender, age and ethnicity estimation in the context of video scenarios. Our main contribution is to use an attribute-specific quality assessment procedure to select best quality frames from a video sequence for each of the three demographic modalities. Best quality frames are classified with fine-tuned MobileNet models and a final video prediction is obtained with a majority voting strategy among the best selected frames. Our validation on three different datasets and our comparison with state-of-the-art models, show the effectiveness of the proposed demographic classifiers and the quality pipeline, which allows to reduce both: the number of frames to be classified and the processing time in practical applications; and improves the soft biometrics prediction accuracy.

Typically, real-world requirements to deploy face recognition models in unconstrained surveillance scenarios demand to identify low-resolution faces with extremely low computational cost. In the last years, several methods based on complex deep learning models have been proposed with promising recognition results but at a high computational cost. Inspired by the compactness and computation efficiency of lightweight deep face networks and their high accuracy on general face recognition tasks, in this work we propose to benchmark two recently introduced lightweight face models on low-resolution surveillance imagery to enable efficient system deployment. In this way, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the two typical settings: LR-to-HR and LR-to-LR matching. In addition, we investigate the effect of using trained models with down-sampled synthetic data from high-resolution images, as well as the combination of different models, for face recognition on real low-resolution images. Experimental results show that the used lightweight face models achieve state-of-the-art results on low-resolution benchmarks with low memory footprint and computational complexity. Moreover, we observed that combining models trained with different degradations improves the recognition accuracy on low-resolution surveillance imagery, which is feasible due to their low computational cost.

Significant advances have been achieved in face recognition in the last decade thanks to the development of deep learning methods. However, recognizing faces captured in uncontrolled environments is still a challenging problem for the scientific community. In these scenarios, the performance of most of existing deep learning based methods abruptly falls, due to the bad quality of the face images. In this work, we propose to use an activation map to represent the quality information in a face image. Different face regions are analyzed to determine their quality and then only those regions with good quality are used to perform the recognition using a given deep face model. For experimental evaluation, in order to simulate unconstrained environments, three challenging databases, with different variations in appearance, were selected: the Labeled Faces in the Wild Database, the Celebrities in Frontal-Profile in the Wild Database, and the AR Database. Three deep face models were used to evaluate the proposal on these databases and in all cases, the use of the proposed activation map allows the improvement of the recognition rates obtained by the original models in a range from 0.3 up to 31%. The obtained results experimentally demonstrated that the proposal is able to select those face areas with higher discriminative power and enough identifying information, while ignores the ones with spurious information.