Age-Invariant Face Recognition

One of the challenges in automatic face recognition is to achieve temporal invariance. In other words, the goal is to come up with a representation and matching scheme that is robust to changes due to facial aging. Facial aging is a complex process that affects both the 3D shape of the face and its texture (e.g., wrinkles). These shape and texture changes degrade the performance of automatic face recognition systems. However, facial aging has not received substantial attention compared to other facial variations due to pose, lighting, and expression. We propose a 3D aging modeling technique and show how it can be used to compensate for the age variations to improve the face recognition performance. The aging modeling technique adapts view-invariant 3D face models to the given 2D face aging database. The proposed approach is evaluated on three different databases (i.g., FG-NET, MORPH, and BROWNS) using FaceVACS, a state-of-the-art commercial face recognition engine.