Eigen-Aging Reference Coding for Cross-Age Face Verification and Retrieval 3
aging process for specific individuals, the proposed reference set traces the aging
process of these eigen face components as eigen-aging reference. We also add dis-
tribution constraint in our sparse coding to guarantee the encoded results follow
good distributions. Contributions of this paper can be concluded into following
four parts:
- Using PCA to remove the redundancy and cover the diversity among training
individuals, which makes each of our eigen-aging reference contain more
useful information.
- The number of reference and result dimension of our method are dramatically
reduced compared with previous reference-based methods. EARC can make
full use of all training individuals without increasing the computational cost.
- The proposed distribution constraint ensures that our encoded result is of
good distributions. It improves the performance of sparse coding.
- The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both retrieval
and verification, which is better than human average performance and very
close to human voting result.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we introduce some
related works. In section 3 and 4, we separate our Eigen-Aging Reference Coding
into reference construction part and encoding part. In section 5, we provide some
experiment results running on CACD. This paper will be concluded in section
6.
2 Related Work
2.1 Cross-Age Face Recognition
Most of the highly qualified researches in cross-age face recognition start after
MORPH [20] dataset is published. It keeps being the largest facial aging dataset
until CACD [1] occurs. Except these two, the other facial aging datasets either
contain small data size or have low quality. Limited by the rareness of datasets,
there are still few researchers focusing on this field. To the best of our knowl-
edge, we divide existing cross-age face recognition methods into three categories:
the modeling approaches, the discriminative approaches and the reference-based
approaches. The modeling approaches [6, 7] change the query faces into the same
age as gallery one. Although it removes some variations caused by facial aging,
the main problem is that the diversity of aging process between different race or
gender can’t be covered, which makes most of the modeling approaches hard to
be general. The discriminative approaches have become popular in recent years.
Most of them seem to be very effective in improving the recognition ability by
eliminating age-sensitive features. Zhifeng Li et al. [8] build Local Patterns Selec-
tion feature descriptor to achieve age-invariance. It applies clustering encoding
tree on feature space and removes facial aging variation by minimizing intra-user
dissimilarity among different ages. Dihong Gong et al. [9] use hidden factor anal-
ysis to separate the features into age-sensitive factors and age-invariant factors.