A computational approach to body mass index prediction from face images

•A computational approach is developed for BMI prediction in face images for the first time.•Our work can validate the psychology study results on a large scale database.•Our computational approach can be useful for smart health.

Human faces encode plenty of useful information. Recent studies in psychology and human perception have found that facial features have relations to human weight or body mass index (BMI). These studies focus on finding the correlations between facial features and the BMI. Motivated by the recent psychology studies, we develop a computational method to predict the BMI from face images automatically. We formulate the BMI prediction from facial features as a machine vision problem, and evaluate our approach on a large database with more than 14,500 face images. A promising result has been obtained, which demonstrates the feasibility of developing a computational system for BMI prediction from face images at a large scale.