What's in a Name? First Names as Facial Attributes

Huizhong Chen, Andrew C. Gallagher, Bernd Girod; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 3366-3373

This paper introduces a new idea in describing people using their first names, i.e., the name assigned at birth. We show that describing people in terms of similarity to a vector of possible first names is a powerful description of facial appearance that can be used for face naming and building facial attribute classifiers. We build models for 100 common first names used in the United States and for each pair, construct a pairwise firstname classifier. These classifiers are built using training images downloaded from the internet, with no additional user interaction. This gives our approach important advantages in building practical systems that do not require additional human intervention for labeling. We use the scores from each pairwise name classifier as a set of facial attributes. We show several surprising results. Our name attributes predict the correct first names of test faces at rates far greater than chance. The name attributes are applied to gender recognition and to age classification, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with all training images automatically gathered from the internet.