Boosting cross-age face verification via generative age normalization

Abstract

Despite the tremendous progress in face verification performance as a result of Deep Learning, the sensitivity to human age variations remains an Achilles' heel of the majority of the contemporary face verification software. A promising solution to this problem consists in synthetic aging/rejuvenation of the input face images to some predefined age categories prior to face verification. We recently proposed [3] Age-cGAN aging/rejuvenation method based on generative adversarial neural networks allowing to synthesize more plausible and realistic faces than alternative non-generative methods. However, in this work, we show that Age-cGAN cannot be directly used for improving face verification due to its slightly imperfect preservation of the original identities in aged/rejuvenated faces. We therefore propose Local Manifold Adaptation (LMA) approach which resolves the stated issue of Age-cGAN resulting in the novel Age-cGAN+LMA aging/rejuvenation method. Based on Age-cGAN+LMA, we design an age normalization algorithm which boosts the accuracy of an off-the-shelf face verification software in the cross-age evaluation scenario.