Cross-age Face Verification Research Articles

Age-Invariant Cross-Age Face Verification using Transfer Learning

The integration of face verification technology has become indispensable in numerous safety and security software systems. Despite its promising results, the field of face verification encounters significant challenges due to age-related disparities. Human facial characteristics undergo substantial transformations over time, leading to diverse variations including changes in facial texture, morphology, facial hair, and eyeglass adoption. This study presents a pioneering methodology for cross-age face verification, utilizing advanced deep learning techniques to extract resilient and distinctive facial features that are less susceptible to age-related fluctuations. The feature extraction process combines handcrafted features like Local Binary Pattern/Histogram of Oriented Gradients with deep features from MobileNetV2 and VGG-16 networks. As the texture of the facial skin defines the age related characteristic the well-known texture feature extractors like LBP and HoG is preferred. These features are concatenated to achieve fusion, and subsequent layers fine-tune them. Experimental validation utilizing the Cross-Age Celebrity Dataset demonstrates remarkable efficacy, achieving an accuracy of 98.32%.

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.

Multi-Task Deep Metric Learning with Boundary Discriminative Information for Cross-Age Face Verification

Image based face verification has attracted extension attention in the fields of pattern recognition and intelligent vision. With difference in age, cross-age face verification from facial images remains a challenging work because of a large number of facial variations caused by shape, skin color and wrinkles and so on. This study proposes a multi-task deep metric learning with boundary discriminative information method called MDML-BDI. It learns a distance metric by exploring discriminative information among the interclass neighborhood samples, such that the distances between intraclass samples are as small as possible and that between interclass neighborhood samples are as far as possible. MDML-BDI learns hierarchical nonlinear transformations by integrating metric learning into the framework of multi-task deep neural network, such that a common shared layer shares the common transformation by multiple tasks, and the other independent layers learn individual task-special transformation for each task. Experimental results on FG-NET, CACD-VS and CALFW datasets show that MDML-BDI achieves satisfactory performance in terms of accuracy and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.

Disentangled representation learning and residual GAN for age-invariant face verification

One of the challenges in cross-age face recognition and verification is to effectively model the facial aging process. Despite the rapid advances in face-related areas, it is still very difficult for existing methods to simultaneously achieve accurate facial feature preservation and reliable aging during aging modeling. Aiming to address this issue, we introduce a Disentangled Representation learning and Residual Generative Adversarial Network (DR-RGAN) that represents the facial features without age interference, which is achieved by explicitly disentangling the facial features and age variation. An encoder-decoder structured generator produces aging images from unstructured facial representations by using the age characteristics provided separately. It can thus take the disentangled representation to preserve personal identity for face verification. Considering that pixel-based errors may cause a loss of detail, a VGG based content loss is further equipped to preferably preserve facial features. The discriminator is trained to distinguish the real from generated faces, carry out identification prediction, and leverage an age estimator to boost the aging accuracy. It is beneficial for obtaining more photorealistic and desirable aging effects, as well as more consistent face verification results. Extensive experiments on the CACD and LFW datasets demonstrate that our DR-RGAN generates pleasing aging imageries and achieves a high accuracy of face verification.

Recurrent Face Aging with Hierarchical AutoRegressive Memory.

Modeling the aging process of human faces is important for cross-age face verification and recognition. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Face Aging (RFA) framework which takes as input a single image and automatically outputs a series of aged faces. The hidden units in the RFA are connected autoregressively allowing the framework to age the person by referring to the previous aged faces. Due to the lack of labeled face data of the same person captured in a long range of ages, traditional face aging models split the ages into discrete groups and learn a one-step face transformation for each pair of adjacent age groups. Since human face aging is a smooth progression, it is more appropriate to age the face by going through smooth transitional states. In this way, the intermediate aged faces between the age groups can be generated. Towards this target, we employ a recurrent neural network whose recurrent module is a hierarchical triple-layer gated recurrent unit which functions as an autoencoder. The bottom layer of the module encodes the input to a latent representation, and the top layer decodes the representation to a corresponding aged face. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Personalized Age Progression with Bi-Level Aging Dictionary Learning.

Age progression is defined as aesthetically re-rendering the aging face at any future age for an individual face. In this work, we aim to automatically render aging faces in a personalized way. Basically, for each age group, we learn an aging dictionary to reveal its aging characteristics (e.g., wrinkles), where the dictionary bases corresponding to the same index yet from two neighboring aging dictionaries form a particular aging pattern cross these two age groups, and a linear combination of all these patterns expresses a particular personalized aging process. Moreover, two factors are taken into consideration in the dictionary learning process. First, beyond the aging dictionaries, each person may have extra personalized facial characteristics, e.g., mole, which are invariant in the aging process. Second, it is challenging or even impossible to collect faces of all age groups for a particular person, yet much easier and more practical to get face pairs from neighboring age groups. To this end, we propose a novel Bi-level Dictionary Learning based Personalized Age Progression (BDL-PAP) method. Here, bi-level dictionary learning is formulated to learn the aging dictionaries based on face pairs from neighboring age groups. Extensive experiments well demonstrate the advantages of the proposed BDL-PAP over other state-of-the-arts in term of personalized age progression, as well as the performance gain for cross-age face verification by synthesizing aging faces.