On facial age progression based on modified active appearance models with face texture

NoAge progression that involves the reconstruction of facial appearance with a natural ageing effect has several applications. These include the search for missing people and identification of fugitives. The majority of age progression methods reported in the literature are data driven. Hence, such methods learn from training data and utilise statistical models such as 3D morphable models and active appearance models (AAM). Principal component analysis (PCA) which is a vital part of these models has an unfortunate drawback of averaging out texture details. Therefore, they work as a low pass filter and as such many of the face skin deformations and minor details become faded. Interestingly, recent work in 2D and 3D animation has shown that patches of the human face are somewhat similar when compared in isolation. Thus, researchers have proposed generating novel faces by compositing small face patches, usually from large image databases. Following these ideas, we propose a novel age progression model which synthesises aged faces using a hybrid of these two techniques. First, an invertible model of age synthesis is developed using AAM and sparse partial least squares regression (sPLS). Then the texture details of the face are enhanced using the patch-based synthesis approach. Our results show that the hybrid algorithm produces both unique and realistic images. Furthermore, our method demonstrates that the identity and ageing effects of subjects can be more emphasised