In recent years, the research on age estimation based on face images has drawn more and more attention, which includes two processes: feature extraction and estimation function learning. In the aspect of face feature extraction, this paper leverages excellent characteristics of convolution neural network in the field of image application, by using deep learning method to extract face features, and adopts factor analysis model to extract robust features. In terms of age estimation function learning, age-based and sequential study of rank-based age estimation learning methods is utilized and then a divide-and-rule face age estimator is proposed. Experiments in FG-NET, MORPH Album 2, and IMDB-WIKI show that the feature extraction method is more robust than traditional age feature extraction method and the performance of divide-and-rule estimator is superior to classical SVM and SVR.

Despite recent notable advancements in highlight image restoration techniques, the dearth of annotated data and the lightweight deployment of highlight removal networks pose significant impediments to further advancements in the field. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we first propose a semi-supervised learning paradigm for highlight removal, merging the fusion version of a teacher–student model and a generative adversarial network, featuring a lightweight network architecture. Initially, we establish a dependable repository to house optimal predictions as pseudo ground truth through empirical analyses guided by the most reliable No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) method. This method serves to assess rigorously the quality of model predictions. Subsequently, addressing concerns regarding confirmation bias, we integrate contrastive regularization into the framework to curtail the risk of overfitting on inaccurate labels. Finally, we introduce a comprehensive feature aggregation module and an extensive attention mechanism within the generative network, considering a balance between network performance and computational efficiency. Our experimental evaluations encompass comprehensive assessments on both full-reference and non-reference highlight benchmarks. The results demonstrate conclusively the substantive quantitative and qualitative enhancements achieved by our proposed algorithm in comparison to state-of-the-art methodologies.

Although deep learning-based approaches for video processing have been extensively investigated, the lack of generality in network construction makes it challenging for practical applications, particularly in video restoration. As a result, this paper presents a universal video restoration model that can simultaneously tackle video inpainting and super-resolution tasks. The network, called Video-Restoration-Net (VRN), consists of four components: (1) an encoder to extract features from each frame, (2) a non-local network that recombines features from adjacent frames or different locations of a given frame, (3) a decoder to restore the coarse video from the output of a non-local block, and (4) a refinement network to refine the coarse video on the frame level. The framework is trained in a three-step pipeline to improve training stability for both tasks. Specifically, we first suggest an automated technique to generate full video datasets for super-resolution reconstruction and another complete-incomplete video dataset for inpainting, respectively. A VRN is then trained to inpaint the incomplete videos. Meanwhile, the full video datasets are adopted to train another VRN frame-wisely and validate it against authoritative datasets. We show quantitative comparisons with several baseline models, achieving 40.5042 dB/0.99473 on PSNR/SSIM in the inpainting task, while during the SR task we obtained 28.41 dB/0.7953 and 27.25/0.8152 on BSD100 and Urban100, respectively. The qualitative comparisons demonstrate that our proposed model is able to complete masked regions and implement super-resolution reconstruction in videos of high quality. Furthermore, the above results show that our method has greater versatility both in video inpainting and super-resolution tasks compared to recent models.