Cross-age Face Recognition Research Articles

Hybrid Spatial-Channel Attention Mechanism for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Face recognition techniques have been widely employed in real-world biomimetics applications. However, traditional approaches have limitations in recognizing faces correctly with large age differences because of significant changes over age in the same person, leading to unsatisfactory recognition performance. To address this, previous studies propose to decompose and identify age and identity features independently in facial images across diverse age groups when optimizing the discriminative model so as to improve the age-invariant face recognition accuracy. Nevertheless, the interrelationships between these features make it difficult for the decomposition to disentangle them properly, thus compromising the recognition accuracy due to the interactive impacts on both features. To this end, this paper proposes a novel deep framework that incorporates a novel Hybrid Spatial-Channel Attention Module to facilitate the cross-age face recognition task. Particularly, the proposed module enables better decomposition of the facial features in both spatial and channel dimensions with attention mechanisms simultaneously while mitigating the impact of age variation on the recognition performance. Beyond this, diverse pooling strategies are also combined when applying those spatial and channel attention mechanisms, which allows the module to generate discriminative face representations while preserving complete information within the original features, further yielding sounder recognition accuracy. The proposed model is extensively validated through experiments on public face datasets such as CACD-VS, AgeDB-30, and FGNET, where the results show significant performance improvements compared to competitive baselines.

Face age synthesis: A review on datasets, methods, and open research areas

Face age synthesis is the determination of how a person looks in the future or the past by reconstructing their facial image. Determining the change in the human face over the years is a critical process for cross-age face recognition systems in forensic issues such as finding missing people and fugitive criminals. Therefore, it is a subject that has attracted attention in recent years. With the implementation of deep learning methods, better quality and photo-realistic images began to be produced. However, researchers continue to improve both aging accuracy and identity preservation requirements. We group the studies in the literature under two categories: classical methods and deep learning methods. We review both categories in the methods used, evaluation methods, and databases.

Method for cross-age face recognition based on identity-age sharing features

从人脸特征中剔除年龄相关特征，获得纯粹的身份特征，是实现跨年龄人脸识别的重要手段；然而，主流的身份特征提取方法忽略了对身份-年龄共享特征的处理，导致提取到的身份特征不完整。为此，提出引入身份-年龄共享特征的新方法，将混合人脸特征解耦为纯年龄相关特征、纯身份相关特征以及身份-年龄共享特征，然后将纯身份相关特征和身份-年龄共享特征进行多维耦合，从而得到完整的身份特征，有效提高跨年龄人脸识别的准确率。在人脸老化基准数据集Age-DB30上本文方法的识别准确率达到了97.07%，在LFW数据集上达到了99.73%的识别准确率，证明了所提方法的有效性与先进性。

Effective Attention-Based Feature Decomposition for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Deep-learning-based, cross-age face recognition has improved significantly in recent years. However, when using the discriminative method, it is still challenging to extract robust age-invariant features that can reduce the interference caused by age. In this paper, we propose a novel, effective, attention-based feature decomposition model, the age-invariant features extraction network, which can learn more discriminative feature representations and reduce the disturbance caused by aging. Our method uses an efficient channel attention block-based feature decomposition module to extract age-independent identity features from facial representations. Our end-to-end framework learns the age-invariant features directly, which is more convenient and can greatly reduce training complexity compared with existing multi-stage training methods. In addition, we propose a direct sum loss function to reduce the interference of age-related features. Our method achieves a comparable and stable performance. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance on four benchmarked datasets over the state-of-the-art. We obtain the relative improvements of 0.06%, 0.2%, and 2.2% on the cross-age datasets CACD-VS, AgeDB, and CALFW, respectively, and a relative 0.03% improvement on a general dataset LFW.

ChildGAN: Face aging and rejuvenation to find missing children

Child-face aging and rejuvenation have amassed considerable active research interest, owing to their immense impact on a broad range of social and security applications, e.g., digital entertainment, fashion and wellness, and searching for long-lost children using childhood photos. All current face aging approaches based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) focus on adult images or long-term aging. We present a new large-scale longitudinal Indian child (ICD) benchmark dataset to facilitate face age progression and regression, cross-age face recognition, age estimation, gender prediction, and kinship face recognition to alleviate these issues. Furthermore, we propose an automatic child-face age progression and regression model, namely, ChildGAN, that generates visually realistic images for enhanced face-identification accuracy while preserving the identity. Consequently, we have trained state-of-the-art (SOTA) face aging models on ICD for comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We also present a multi-racial experiments dataset named Multi-Racial Child Dataset (MRCD) containing 64,965 child face images. The images are selected from publicly available datasets and web crawling. Finally, we investigate the generalization of ChildGAN by experimenting with White, Black, Asian, and Indian races. The experimental results suggest that the proposed ChildGAN and SOTA models can aid in reconnecting young children, who were lost at a young age as victims of child trafficking or abduction, with their families. The model and the MRCD web crawled images are available at https://github.com/praveenkumarchandaliya/ChildGAN_Tamp1/.

MAM: Multiple Attention Mechanism Neural Networks for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Cross-age face recognition problem is of great challenge in practical applications because face features of the same person at different ages contain variant aging features in addition to the invariant identity features. To better extract the age-invariant identity features hiding beneath the age-variant aging features, a deep learning-based approach with multiple attention mechanisms is proposed in this paper. First, we propose the stepped local pooling strategy to improve the SE module. Then by incorporating the residual-attention mechanism, the self-attention mechanism, and the improved channel-attention mechanism to the backbone network, we proposed the Multiple Attention Mechanism Network (MAM-CNN) framework for the cross-age face recognition problem. The proposed framework can focus on essential face regions to highlight identity features and diminish the distractions caused by aging features. Experiments are carried out on two well-known public domain face aging datasets (MORPH and CACD-VS). The results yielded prove that the introduced multiple mechanisms jointly enhance the model performance by 0.96% and 0.52%, respectively, over the state-of-the-art algorithms.

PlasticGAN: Holistic generative adversarial network on face plastic and aesthetic surgery.

By embracing Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), several face-related applications have significantly benefited and achieved unparalleled success. Inspired by the latest advancement in GAN, we propose the PlasticGAN which is a holistic framework for generating images of post-surgery faces as well as reconstruction of faces after surgery completion. This preliminary model works as a helping hand in assisting surgeons, biometric researchers, and practitioners in clinical decision-making by identifying patient cohorts that require building up of confidence with the help of vivid visualizations prior to treatment. It helps them better provide the tentative alternatives by simulating aging patterns. We used the face recognition system for evaluating the same individual with and without masks on surgery face, keeping the current trends in mind such as forensic and security application and recent worldwide COVID scenario. The experimental results suggested that plastic surgery-based synthetic cross-age face recognition (PSBSCAFR) is an arduous research challenge, and state-of-art face recognition systems can negatively affect face recognition performance. This can present a new dimension for the research community.

Learning age semantic factor to enhance group-based representations for cross-age face recognition

Learning age semantic factor to enhance group-based representations for cross-age face recognition

Prediction of Changed Faces with HSCNN

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been successfully employed in the field of image classification. However, CNN trained using images from several years ago may be unable to identify how such images have changed over time. Cross-age face recognition is, therefore, a substantial challenge. Several efforts have been made to resolve facial changes over time utilizing recurrent neural networks (RNN) with CNN. The structure of RNN contains hidden contextual information in a hidden state to transfer a state in the previous step to the next step. This paper proposes a novel model called Hidden State-CNN (HSCNN). This adds to CNN a convolution layer of the hidden state saved as a parameter in the previous step and requires no more computing resources than CNN. The previous CNN-RNN models perform CNN and RNN, separately and then merge the results. Therefore, their systems consume twice the memory resources and CPU time, compared with the HSCNN system, which works the same as CNN only. HSCNN consists of 3 types of models. All models load hidden state ht−1 from parameters of the previous step and save ht as a parameter for the next step. In addition, model-B adds ht−1 to x, which is the previous output. The summation of ht−1 and x is multiplied by weight W. In model-C the convolution layer has two weights: W1 and W2. Training HSCNN with faces of the previous step is for testing faces of the next step in the experiment. That is, HSCNN trained with past facial data is then used to verify future data. It has been found to exhibit 10 percent greater accuracy than traditional CNN with a celeb face database.

A Unified Framework for Biphasic Facial Age Translation With Noisy-Semantic Guided Generative Adversarial Networks

Biphasic facial age translation aims at predicting the appearance of the input face at any age. Facial age translation has received considerable research attention in the last decade due to its practical value in cross-age face recognition and various entertainment applications. However, most existing methods model age changes between holistic images, regardless of the human face structure and the age-changing patterns of individual facial components. Consequently, the lack of semantic supervision will cause infidelity of generated faces in detail. To this end, we propose a unified framework for biphasic facial age translation with noisy-semantic guided generative adversarial networks. Structurally, we project the class-aware noisy semantic layouts to “soft” latent maps for the following injection operation on the individual facial parts. In particular, we introduce two sub-networks, ProjectionNet and ConstraintNet. ProjectionNet introduces the low-level structural semantic information with noise map and produces “soft” latent maps. ConstraintNet disentangles the high-level spatial features to constrain the “soft” latent maps, which endows more age-related context into the “soft” latent maps. Specifically, attention mechanism is employed in ConstraintNet for feature disentanglement. Meanwhile, in order to mine the strongest mapping ability of the network, we embed two types of learning strategies in the training procedure, supervised self-driven generation and unsupervised condition-driven cycle-consistent generation. As a result, extensive experiments conducted on MORPH and CACD datasets demonstrate the prominent ability of our proposed method which achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Cross-Age Face Recognition Based on Deep Learning

Cross-Age Face Recognition Based on Deep Learning

Deep low-rank feature learning and encoding for cross-age face recognition

Cross-age face recognition (CAFR) is a challenging task, due to significant intra-personal variations. Furthermore, the training and testing data may contain random noise components. To address these issues, this paper proposes a deep low-rank feature learning and encoding method. Firstly, our method employs manifold learning in the low-rank optimization, which preserves the global and local structure of the data samples, while learning the clean low-rank features. Secondly, we encode the low-rank features using our locality-constrained feature encoding method, which learns an age-insensitive codebook from training data, and enables the intra-class samples to share the same local bases in a codebook. In the testing stage, the gallery and probe features are encoded by the learned codebook, which represents the images of the same identity by similar codewords for recognition. Furthermore, the periocular region of human faces is investigated for CAFR. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

The identity-level angular triplet loss for cross-age face recognition

The identity-level angular triplet loss for cross-age face recognition

Wasserstein Divergence GAN With Cross-Age Identity Expert and Attribute Retainer for Facial Age Transformation

We propose the Wasserstein Divergence GAN with an identity expert and an attribute retainer for facial age transformation. The Wasserstein Divergence GAN (WGAN-div) can better stabilize the training and lead to better target image generation. The identity expert aims to preserve the input identity at output, and the attribute retainer aims to preserve the input attribute at output. Unlike the previous works which take a specific model for identity and attribute preservation without giving a reason, both the identity expert and the attribute retainer in our proposed model are determined from a comprehensive comparison study on the state-of-the-art pretrained models. The candidate networks considered for identity preservation include the VGG-Face, VGG-Face2, LightCNN and ArcFace. The candidate backbones for making the attribute retainer are the VGG-Face, VGG-Object and DEX networks. This study offers a guidebook for choosing the appropriate modules for identity and attribute preservation. The interactions between the identity expert and attribute retainer are also extensively studied and experimented. To further enhance the performance, we augment the data by the 3DMM and explore the advantages of the additional training on cross-age datasets. The additional cross-age training is validated to make the identity expert capable of handling cross-age face recognition. The performance of our approach is justified by the desired age transformation with identity well preserved. Experiments on benchmark databases show that the proposed approach is highly competitive to state-of-the-art methods.

Parallel Multi-Path Age Distinguish Network for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Cross Age Face Recognition (CAFR) is a challenging task in the field of face recognition. There still exist some limitations in mainstream CAFR methods. On one hand, some methods need synthesizing multiple groups of features and fusing the results under different ages, where the similarity score in some age groups may affect final classification results. On the other hand, many other methods takes a facial image as a linear combination of identity information and age information, which treats age factor as a value independent of identity information, but may be inconsistent with the aging pattern of many individuals. And these methods require both age labels and identity labels in training, which is limited by the scale of existing CAFR datasets. To address the above limitations, this work proposes the Parallel Multi-path Age Distinguish Network (PMADN) model. Specifically, our model consists of two cascading networks, an Age Distinguish Mapping Network (ADMN) and a Cross-Age Feature Recombination Network (CFRN). Firstly, the face features are mapped into different age groups by parallel multi-path full connected layers in ADMN, which can better extract the identity features in a small age span. Secondly, CFRN nonlinearly recombines the mapped features to extract the age robust features that are beneficial to identity classification, which can avoid the simple linear combination of identity factor and age factor in the existing methods. What's more, our algorithm is combined with transfer learning and only uses the age label and a pre-trained ordinary face recognition network for training, which can make use of a larger aging face dataset for training. Extensive CAFR experiments performed on the benchmark MORPH Album2, CACD-VS and Cross Age LFW databases demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

Cross-Age Identity Difference Analysis Model Based on Image Pairs for Age Invariant Face Verification

Face recognition (FR) is a widely studied topic in the field of computer vision research. Although promising results are achieved, FR researches still face challenges of age variations. Most existing FR networks conduct classification based on the feature similarity, which may be misled by large intra class difference under age variations. Instead of calculating feature similarity, in this paper, we derive a novel cross-age face verification framework named Cross-Age Identity Difference Analysis (CIDA) model, which analyzes the identity difference between image pairs under age variations. Specifically, our framework includes two cascading networks. Firstly, an Identity Difference Feature Extractor (IDFE) is proposed to extract the difference information between the input image pair, where the identity discriminant features are effectively extracted, while other interference factors such as age, illumination, posture are suppressed. Secondly, the Direct Cross-age Verification Network (DCVN) is proposed to directly decide whether the input image pair is from the same individual. We derive a novel loss function, where the classification loss with larger age difference is assigned larger weights, which urges the classifier to pay attention to the classification process of the samples with large age gap. Besides, the loss of DCVN are integrated with the loss function of IDFE as a feedback of the final classification performance, improving the discriminant power of IDFE. Through synchronous training of the two networks, we can finally achieve end-to-end network architecture. Compared with the existing cross-age face recognition (CAFR) methods, we do not need to consider feature similarity comparison, which provides a new insight for cross-age face recognition task. Extensive experiments have been performed on the benchmark CAFR datasets which verify the effectiveness of our model.

Towards Age-Invariant Face Recognition.

Despite the remarkable progress in face recognition related technologies, reliably recognizing faces across ages remains a big challenge. The appearance of a human face changes substantially over time, resulting in significant intra-class variations. As opposed to current techniques for age-invariant face recognition, which either directly extract age-invariant features for recognition, or first synthesize a face that matches target age before feature extraction, we argue that it is more desirable to perform both tasks jointly so that they can leverage each other. To this end, we propose a deep Age-Invariant Model (AIM) for face recognition in the wild with three distinct novelties. First, AIM presents a novel unified deep architecture jointly performing cross-age face synthesis and recognition in a mutual boosting way. Second, AIM achieves continuous face rejuvenation/aging with remarkable photorealistic and identity-preserving properties, avoiding the requirement of paired data and the true age of testing samples. Third, effective and novel training strategies are developed for end-to-end learning of the whole deep architecture, which generates powerful age-invariant face representations explicitly disentangled from the age variation. Moreover, we construct a new large-scale Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) benchmark dataset to facilitate existing efforts and push the frontiers of age-invariant face recognition research. Extensive experiments on both our CAFR dataset and several other cross-age datasets (MORPH, CACD, and FG-NET) demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AIM model over the state-of-the-arts. Benchmarking our model on the popular unconstrained face recognition datasets YTF and IJB-C additionally verifies its promising generalization ability in recognizing faces in the wild.

Discriminative common feature subspace learning for age‐invariant face recognition

Considering human ageing has a big impact on cross-age face recognition, and the effect of ageing on face recognition in non-ideal images has not been well addressed yet. In this study, the authors propose a discriminative common feature subspace learning method to deal with the problem. Specifically, they consider the samples of the same individual with big age gaps have different distributions in the original space, and employ the maximum mean discrepancy as the distance measure to compute the distances between the sample means of the different distributions. Then the distance measure is integrated into Fisher criterion to learn a discriminative common feature subspace. The aim is to map the images with different ages to the common subspace, and to construct new feature representation which is robust to age variations and discriminative to different subjects. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method on cross-age face recognition, the authors construct extensive experiments on CACD and FG-Net databases. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other subspace based methods and state-of-art cross-age face recognition methods.

A Parallel Architecture of Age Adversarial Convolutional Neural Network for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) remains one of the most challenging tasks in the field of face recognition, as the aging process significantly affects the facial appearance. Another limitation is the insufficient special datasets that cover a wide range of ages. The key to tackle this problem is to separate the variations caused by aging process from facial features and obtain stable person-specific features. Specifically, we proposed a novel end-to-end CNN method called Age Adversarial Convolutional Neural Network (AA-CNN) with parallel network architecture. By adversarial training in Age Discrimination Network (ADN), the features extracted by AA-CNN are invariant to age variation, while remaining identity discriminative via joint training in Identity Recognition Network (IRN). Furthermore, we adopt a pyramid architecture of feature fusion to assist the ADN in adversarial training to obtain effective age-related information. The training datasets of AA-CNN are labeled by identity or age, and there is no need to search for the datasets with both identity and age labels. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the challenging aging face datasets, including FG-NET dataset, MORPH Album 2 dataset, Cross-Age Celebrity dataset, and Cross-Age LFW dataset, which demonstrates the superiority and effectiveness of the AA-CNN model.

Cycle Age-Adversarial Model Based on Identity Preserving Network and Transfer Learning for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Age variations bring a large challenge for face recognition tasks. Existing Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) methods have two limitations. Firstly, many CAFR approaches require both age labels and identity labels for training. However, it is difficult to collect images under a large age span from each individual. Secondly, many works are based on the assumption that age and identity information are independent of each other, which may not satisfy various conditions. In this paper, a Cycle Age-Adversarial Model (CAAM) is proposed for CAFR, which only uses the age labels for training without considering independence hypothesis. CAAM includes two different branch networks. Firstly, the branch of Age-robust Feature Extracting Model (AFEM) is designed to adaptively learn age-invariant features by adversarial learning scheme, which includes an age discriminator network and a feature generator network. The age discriminator network is trained to discriminate the age information, and the generator extracts age-invariant features through adversarial learning with discriminator. Secondly, a branch of the Identity Preserving Network (IPN) is proposed to keep identity information, which introduces Unsupervised Identity Loss (UIL) to enlarge the inter-class distance, and decrease the loss of identity information in the learning process. Finally, the features of the two branches are cyclically optimized through minmizing Feature Consistency Loss (FCL), which integrates age invariance learning and identity discrimination learning into final feature representation. Different from existing CAFR networks, our adversarial learning strategy for age-robust feature learning can be generalized to other attributes including pose and expression. Moreover, we introduce cycle optimization strategy to merge the advantages of two branch networks, which is a novel strategy to fuse multi-task features. Extensive CAFR experiments performed on the benchmark MORPH Album2, CACD-VS and Cross Age LFW databases demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of CAAM.