Deep Multi-Task Learning for Joint Prediction of Heterogeneous Face Attributes
Face attribute prediction has important applications in video surveillance, face retrieval, and social media. While a number of methods have been proposed for face attribute prediction, most of them did not explicitly consider the attribute correlation and heterogeneity during feature learning. In this paper, we propose a Deep Multi-Task Learning (DMTL) network to jointly learn multiple models; each addresses the prediction of one category of homogenous attributes. Specifically, we group the heterogeneous face attributes into two categories (i.e., nominal and ordinal), and design corresponding prediction models. At the same time, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) for early stage feature learning, which is shared by all the attributes. Experiments on the publicdomain MORPH II, CelebA, and LFWA databases show that the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art in joint face attribute prediction, and has good generalization ability.