Adversarial UV-Transformation Texture Estimation for 3D Face Aging

Face aging aims to estimate aged facial textures given a certain face image. A number of 2D face-aging methods have been developed, but there have been few studies on 3D face aging, which would be valuable in several real-world applications. The lack of 3D face-aging data has had a significant impact on the development of 3D face aging, but we hypothesized that the large amounts of 2D face-aging data on the internet could be leveraged for 3D aged facial textures. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D aging framework, which we call UV-transformation texture estimation based on generative adversarial networks (UVTE-GAN), to achieve 3D face aging. Specifically, the proposed framework has three parts: 1) a 3D vertex and texture estimator, which accurately estimates the face’s spatial vertices and textures; 2) a texture-aging GAN, which is responsible for aging the estimated texture map via adversarial learning; and 3) a 2D & 3D rendering rebuilder, which recovers 2D & 3D faces using the estimated facial vertex map and aged facial texture map. In addition, we also design a plugin layer that allows us to train the whole model in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in synthesizing visually pleasing 3D aged face pictures, and state-of-the-art performance is achieved on several public datasets.