A study on the influence of body weight changes on face recognition

Overweight and obesity is quite common in the modern society, which can result in many severe health problems. Thus weight loss has become a major event for many people to have a healthy living. A question is then raised for Biometrics or identity management: Is there any influence on face recognition when the facial shapes are varied, caused by body weight changes? No previous research has addressed this issue, to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we study the influence of body weight changes on face recognition. Both synthesized and real face images are assembled as the databases to facilitate our study. Empirically, we found that large body weight alterations can significantly reduce the matching accuracy of the face recognition system. This is a new exploration to the biometrics society. Then we study if the influence of weight changes can be reduced to improve the face recognition performance. The partial least squares (PLS) method is applied for this purpose. Our preliminary results show that it is feasible to develop algorithms to address the influence of facial adiposity variation on face recognition, caused by weight changes.