Show me your face and I will tell your height, weight and body mass index.
Together with a person’s gender, age and race, their weight status is a publicly visible signal that can have profound influence on many aspects of their life. Most obviously, it can affect their health as having a larger BMI is linked to an increased risk of both cardio-vascular diseases and diabetes, though not necessarily in a straight-forward manner (Meigs and others 2006). However, other aspects of the burden imposed by obesity come in the form of “fat shaming” and other forms of “sizeism”. For example, obesity is related to a lower income and part of the reason seems to be due to weight-based discrimination. The human face exhibits information pertaining to identity, a person’s disposition, demeanor, as well as to attributes such as gender, age and ethnicity. From the perspective of biometrics, emphasis has predominantly been placed on facial recognition.