Face aging simulation has received rising investigations nowadays, whereas it still remains a challenge to generate convincing and natural age-progressed face images. In this paper, we present a ...novel approach to such an issue using hidden factor analysis joint sparse representation. In contrast to the majority of tasks in the literature that integrally handle the facial texture, the proposed aging approach separately models the person-specific facial properties that tend to be stable in a relatively long period and the age-specific clues that gradually change over time. It then transforms the age component to a target age group via sparse reconstruction, yielding aging effects, which is finally combined with the identity component to achieve the aged face. Experiments are carried out on three face aging databases, and the results achieved clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in rendering a face with aging effects. In addition, a series of evaluations prove its validity with respect to identity preservation and aging effect generation.
To minimize the impact of age variation on face recognition, age-invariant face recognition (AIFR) extracts identity-related discriminative features by minimizing the correlation between identity- ...and age-related features while face age synthesis (FAS) eliminates age variation by converting the faces in different age groups to the same group. However, AIFR lacks visual results for model interpretation and FAS compromises downstream recognition due to artifacts. Therefore, we propose a unified, multi-task framework to jointly handle these two tasks, termed MTLFace, which can learn the age-invariant identity-related representation for face recognition while achieving pleasing face synthesis for model interpretation. Specifically, we propose an attention-based feature decomposition to decompose the mixed face features into two uncorrelated components-identity- and age-related features-in a spatially constrained way. Unlike the conventional one-hot encoding that achieves group-level FAS, we propose a novel identity conditional module to achieve identity-level FAS, which can improve the age smoothness of synthesized faces through a weight-sharing strategy. Benefiting from the proposed multi-task framework, we then leverage those high-quality synthesized faces from FAS to further boost AIFR via a novel selective fine-tuning strategy. Furthermore, to advance both AIFR and FAS, we collect and release a large cross-age face dataset with age and gender annotations, and a new benchmark specifically designed for tracing long-missing children. Extensive experimental results on five benchmark cross-age datasets demonstrate that MTLFace yields superior performance than state-of-the-art methods for both AIFR and FAS. We further validate MTLFace on two popular general face recognition datasets, obtaining competitive performance on face recognition in the wild. The source code and datasets are available at http://hzzone.github.io/MTLFace .
Face aging has received increasing attention from the computer vision community due to wide applications in the real world. Age accuracy and identity preserving are two important indicators for face ...aging. Previous works usually rely on an extra pre-trained module for identity preserving and multi-level discriminators for fine-grained features extraction. In this work, we propose a cycle-consistent loss based method for face aging with wavelet-based multi-level facial attributes extraction from both generator and discriminators. The proposed model consists of one generator with three-level encoders and three levels of discriminators with an age and a gender classifier on top of each discriminator. Experiment results on both MORPH and CACD show that the application of multi-level generator can improve the identity preserving effects in face aging and reduce the training time significantly by eliminating the rely of an identity preserving module. Our model can outperform most of the existing approaches include the state-of-the-art techniques on two benchmark aging databases in terms of both aging accuracy and identity verification confidence, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
•Wavelet-based multi-level generator was applied to face aging for the first time.•Time reduction for model training without a pretrained module for identity preserving.•Outperforms the state of the arts in both aging accuracy and identity preserving.•Our model can generate images with a continuous and smooth increase of age.
Abstract
The aging process creates significant changes in the appearances of people’s faces. When compared to other causes of variation in face imaging, aging-related variation has specific distinct ...properties. Facial Aging variations, for example, is unique for each person; it occurs gradually and is significantly influenced by other characteristics including health, gender, and life-style. As a result, the proposed effort will use Generative Adversarial Networks to address these critical concerns (GANs). Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN’s) is made up of a generator and a discriminator network. The generator model generates images that a discriminator model analyses to determine if they are real or fake. This paper provides a Temporal Face Feature Progressive framework with Cycle GAN, which maintains the initial appearance and identity in the elderly aspect of their facial structure. To address aging concerns, our goal is to transform an initial age category image into a targeted age with age progression. We show that our temporal face features progressive cycle GAN learns and transfers facial traits from the source group to the targeted group by training various images. The IMDB-WIKI Face dataset has been used to obtain the results for the same.
Face aging has attracted widespread attention in recent years, but most studies are based on the same emotional situation. Is the same person's aging in different emotional situations the same? To ...solve the above confusion, this paper proposes a novel face aging model DEF-Net, which consists of two parts: different emotional learnings (Emotion-Net) and face aging (Age-Net). Given a target emotion category, DEF-Net first assists the image from the original dataset to learn the emotion features through Emotion-Net and the generated dataset is used as the inputs of Age-Net. At the same time, multiple loss functions are used to ensure that the crucial information of the original image is not lost. Secondly, Age-Net, which has been pre-trained on the original dataset, began to adopt the generated dataset to learn the aging distribution under different emotions. Designed loss functions are utilized to ensure that the realistic target images generated by Age-Net do not lose the learned emotional characteristics. Finally, extensive experiments are used to verify the performance of DEF-Net. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods: (1) DEF-Net can learn different facial emotions across different datasets and generate corresponding realistic aging images; (2) the results achieved by our DEF-Net are demonstrated to be better than those by the model that performs face aging first and then learns different emotional characteristics.
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.
Existing face aging (FA) approaches usually concentrate on a universal aging pattern, and produce restricted aging faces from one-to-one mapping. However, the diversity of living environments impact ...individuals differently in their oldness. To simulate various aging effects, we propose a multimodal FA framework based on face disentanglement technique of age-specific and age-irrelevant information. A Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based encoder is designed to represent the distribution of the age-specific attributes. To capture the age-irrelevant features, a cycle-consistency loss of unpaired faces is utilized among various age spans. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the sampled age-specific codes along with an age-irrelevant feature make the multimodal FA diverse and realistic.
Age is one of the most important biological characteristics of the human face. The increase of age coincides with the increase of the aging degree of the face. Face aging synthesis is attracting ...increasingly more attention from domestic and overseas scholars in the computer vision and computer graphics fields, and it can be integrated into the basic research of face correlation, such as cross‐age face analysis and age estimation. At present, some achievements have been made in face aging synthesis research; however, it is still an urgent problem to reduce the number of parameters and computational complexity of the network while ensuring the aging effect. Therefore, a new face aging algorithm is proposed in this article. Unlike the previous methods of aging process simulation, we introduce an assisted age classification network based on the principle of homology continuity, which is more in line with the human cognition process. After pretraining, the result of age classification is improved, and the pretraining model is then added to the framework of aging face generation for fine‐tuning to constrain the generated aging face, which can improve the aging accuracy of the generated image. Furthermore, we reconstruct the input face by using the age tag of the input face and the synthesized aging face and maintain the identity invariance in the face aging process by minimizing the reconstruction loss. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this article produces a considerable effect of face aging and significantly reduces the number of parameters and the complexity of computational.
Face aging (FA) for young faces refers to rendering the aging faces at target age for an individual, generally under 20s, which is an important topic of facial age analysis. Unlike traditional FA for ...adults, it is challenging to age children with one deep learning-based FA network, since there are deformations of facial shapes and variations of textural details. To alleviate the deficiency, a unified FA framework for young faces is proposed, which consists of two decoupled networks to apply aging image translation. It explicitly models transformations of geometry and appearance using two components: GD-GAN, which simulates the Geometric Deformation using Generative Adversarial Network; TV-GAN, which simulates the Textural Variations guided by the age-related saliency map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method has advantages over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of synthesizing visually plausible images for young faces, as well as preserving the personalized features.
•Face aging for young faces refers to rendering the aging faces at target age for an individual, generally under 20s.•Realistic generated face portrayals are helpful for finding missing children by offering probable aging appearances.•Both facial shapes deform and textures vary in face aging for young child.•During facial image synthesizing, personal identity should be preserved.
Face aging has received significant research attention in recent years. Although great progress has been achieved with the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in synthesizing realistic ...images, most existing GAN-based face aging methods have two main problems: 1) unnatural changes of high-level semantic information due to the insufficient consideration of prior knowledge of input faces, and 2) distortions of low-level image content (e.g. modifications in age-irrelevant regions). In this article, we introduce A 3 GAN, an Attribute-Aware Attentive face aging model to address the above issues. Facial attribute vectors are regarded as the conditional information and embedded into both the generator and discriminator, encouraging synthesized faces to be faithful to attributes of corresponding inputs. To improve the visual fidelity of generation results, we leverage the attention mechanism to restrict modifications to age-related areas and preserve image details. Unlike previous works with attention modules, we introduce face parsing maps to help the generator distinguish image regions of interest and suppress attention activation elsewhere. Moreover, the wavelet packet transform is employed to capture textural features at multiple scales in the frequency space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in synthesizing photo-realistic aged face images and achieving state-of-the-art performance on popular datasets.
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