Identification of malnutrition and prediction of BMI from facial images using real‐time image processing and machine learning

Abstract Human faces contain useful information that can be used in the identification of age, gender, weight etc. Among these biometrics, body mass index (BMI) and body weight are good indicators of a healthy person. Motivated by the recent health science studies, this work investigates ways to identify malnutrition affected people and obese people by analyzing body weight and BMI from facial images by proposing a regression method based on the 50‐layers Residual network architecture. For face detection, Multi‐task Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks have been employed. A system is created to evaluate BMI along with age and gender from human facial real‐time images. Malnutrition and obesity are commonly determined with the help of BMI. In the previous works, height, weight, and BMI estimation through automatic means have predominantly focused on full‐body images and videos of humans. The usage of facial images for estimating such traits have been given less importance. In order to facilitate the analysis, the dataset is cleaned along with metadata containing information about the persons height, weight, age, and gender. Gender‐based analysis is performed for the prediction of BMI. Finally, an email containing the persons picture along with their details is sent to the concerned health officer.