Face aging by sparse representation

Abstract

Face aging aims at synthesizing one's face at different ages which interests many researchers in fields of cartoon animation, age estimation, face recognition, etc. However, modelling aging process is still challenging due to lack of robust features and a reasonable training set. In this paper we propose a novel automatic face aging approach through Maximum A Posteriori (MAP), a face is firstly warped by global geometric transformation, and then elder skin is locally synthesized by sparse coding. Our contribution includes an aging model both for children growth and adults aging, and high-level features by sparse representation aiming at a small training set while not downgrading the quality of synthesis. Moreover, the newly proposed features simplify the algorithm and lead to a fast implementation. Experiments show the proposed approach outperforms the existing methods. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.