Deep Learning Based Real Age And Gender Estimation From Unconstrained Face Image Towards Smart Store Customer Relationship Management

Featured ApplicationA smart store customer relationship management system to estimate the customer's age and gender for simplifying the shopping experience by facilitating personalized product recommendation and advertisement to promote the smart trading along with developing an inventory for future business promotion.The COVID-19 pandemic markedly changed the human shopping nature, necessitating a contactless shopping system to curb the spread of the contagious disease efficiently. Consequently, a customer opts for a store where it is possible to avoid physical contacts and shorten the shopping process with extended services such as personalized product recommendations. Automatic age and gender estimation of a customer in a smart store strongly benefit the consumer by providing personalized advertisement and product recommendation; similarly, it aids the smart store proprietor to promote sales and develop an inventory perpetually for the future retail. In our paper, we propose a deep learning-founded enterprise solution for smart store customer relationship management (CRM), which allows us to predict the age and gender from a customer's face image taken in an unconstrained environment to facilitate the smart store's extended services, as it is expected for a modern venture. For the age estimation problem, we mitigate the data sparsity problem of the large public IMDB-WIKI dataset by image enhancement from another dataset and perform data augmentation as required. We handle our classification tasks utilizing an empirically leading pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN), the VGG-16 network, and incorporate batch normalization. Especially, the age estimation task is posed as a deep classification problem followed by a multinomial logistic regression first-moment refinement. We validate our system for two standard benchmarks, one for each task, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for both real age and gender estimation.