Individualised model of facial age synthesis based on constrained regression

Abstract

Faces convey much information. Interestingly we humans have a remarkable ability of identifying, extracting, and interpreting this information. Recently automatic facial ageing (AFA) has gained popularity due to its numerous applications which include search for missing people, biometrics, and multimedia. The problem of AFA is faced with various challenges, including incomplete training datasets, unrestrained environments, ethnic and gender variations to mention but a few. This work presents a new approach to automatic facial ageing which involves the development of a person specific facial ageing system. A color based Active Appearance Model (AAM) is used to extract facial features. Then, regression is used to model an age estimator. Age synthesis is achieved by computing a solution that minimises the distance from the original face with the use of constrained regression. The model is tested on a challenging database of single image per person. Initial results suggest that plausible images can be rerendered at different ages, automatically using the AAM representation. Using the constrained regressor we are guaranteed to get estimated ages that are exact for an individual at a given age.