Face Recognition and Age Estimation Implications of Changes in Facial Features: A Critical Review Study

Facial features are considered as one of the important personal characteristics. This can be used in many applications, such as face recognition and age estimation. The value of these applications depends in several areas, such as security applications, law enforcement applications, and attendance systems. In addition, facial features are particularly the key usage in the finding of lost child. Present applications have achieved a high level of accuracy. This paper provides a survey of face recognition, including the age estimation, which was discussed. Moreover, the research outlines several challenges faced in face recognition area that had been explored. The research also provides a landscape mapping based on integrating into a critical and coherent taxonomy. In the methodology sections, the exploration the accomplished via a deep focused in every single article in “Face Recognition”, then “Age Estimation”, and later in “Facial Features”. The “Articles extraction” is mining from diverse sources, such as Web of Science, ACM, IEEE, Science Direct, and Springer databases. The research covers overall 72 articles; 32/72 articles were face recognition. Moreover, 39/72 of the articles were for age estimation. A comparison based on the objectives of the approaches is presented to underline the taxonomy. Ending by research conclusion on face techniques contributes to the understanding of the recognition approaches, which can be used in future researches. The research concluded that face techniques’ performance is distinct from one data set to another. This paper contributes to display gaps for other researchers to join this line of research.