Vendors and researchers are paying a lot of attention to estimating ages by using a person’s face, and all of us are awaiting NIST’s results on its age estimation tests.
But are there other ways to estimate ages?
As Biometric Update reports, a recent Experimental Dermatology study (“Predicting human chronological age via AI analysis of dorsal hand versus facial images: A study in a cohort of Indian females“) looks at hand features (specifically from the back of the hand, not the palm side) as an alternative method of age estimation (as opposed to using face features as many vendors do today).
But before you declare dorsal hand features as the solution to age estimation, consider:
- As the title states, the study only looked at females. No idea if my masculine hand features are predictive. (Anecdotally, more males work at tasks such as bricklaying that affect the hands, including the knuckle texture that was highlighted in the study.)
- As the title states, the study only looked at people from India. No idea if my American/German/English/etc. hand features are predictive. (To be fair, the subjects had a variety of skin tones.)
- The study only had 1454 subjects. Better than a study that used less than 20 people, but still not enough. More research is needed.
And even with all of that, the mean absolute error in age estimation was over 4 years.
Before taking a headline as fact, you have to know which questions to ask.
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