Photo Dating by Facial Age Aggregation

TL;DR

This paper presents a new method for estimating the year a photo was taken by aggregating facial age information from multiple individuals, supported by a large annotated dataset and a probabilistic framework.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Photo Dating approach that combines multi-face age evidence with temporal priors, and releases a large dataset for research.

Findings

Aggregation improves dating accuracy.

Outperforms scene-based baselines.

Effective for images with multiple faces.

Abstract

We introduce a novel method for Photo Dating which estimates the year a photograph was taken by leveraging information from the faces of people present in the image. To facilitate this research, we publicly release CSFD-1.6M, a new dataset containing over 1.6 million annotated faces, primarily from movie stills, with identity and birth year annotations. Uniquely, our dataset provides annotations for multiple individuals within a single image, enabling the study of multi-face information aggregation. We propose a probabilistic framework that formally combines visual evidence from modern face recognition and age estimation models, and career-based temporal priors to infer the photo capture year. Our experiments demonstrate that aggregating evidence from multiple faces consistently improves the performance and the approach significantly outperforms strong, scene-based baselines, particularly for images containing several identifiable individuals.