Facial Age Estimation for Age Fraud Detection in National ID Systems

Abstract

Identity fraud during biometric enrollment and updates remains a major challenge for large-scale national identity systems. A common fraud vector is misrepresenting one's age to access age-restricted services or welfare schemes. In this work, we present SwinAge, a facial age estimation system designed for use within the Aadhaar biometric enrollment pipeline, to assist quality-check (QC) operators to flag potential age-related fraud. This is critical for a system like Aadhaar (the world's largest national identity programme), that holds about 1.5 billion unique identities, with 22.4 million new enrollments and 283 million updates in the last year. Building upon the SwinFace architecture with landmark-based similarity (warp affine) alignment, we train on a large in-house dataset of 1.45 million face images and evaluate on an independent, age-stratified test set of 283K images, both drawn from an ethnically diverse population of 716K unique subjects. We investigate three Aadhaar-specific operational thresholds (5, 18, and 60 years) and propose a deployment triage framework that flags suspected cases for manual review. Following NIST FATE, we report false acceptance/rejection rates (FAR/FRR) at each threshold rather than aggregate accuracy: at 1% FAR the model achieves an FRR of 3% (<5yrs), 0.4% (>18yrs) and 11.0% (>60yrs). SwinAge achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.94 years on the same test set, outperforming three zero-shot vision language models on all benchmarks, and improving the state-of-the-art on 5 out of 7 public benchmark datasets. We further report per-gender errors and distill lessons for national identity programs.