Learning long term face aging patterns from partially dense aging databases

Studies on face aging are handicapped by lack of long term dense aging sequences for model training. To handle this problem, we propose a new face aging model, which learns long term face aging patterns from partially dense aging databases. The learning strategy is based on two assumptions: (i) short term face aging pattern is relatively simple and is possible to be learned from currently available databases; (ii) long term face aging is a continuous and smooth Markov process. Adopting a compositional face representation, our aging algorithm learns a function-based short term aging model from real aging sequences to infer facial parameters within a short age span. Based on the predefined smoothness criteria between two overlapping short term aging patterns, we concatenate these learned short term aging patterns to build the long term aging patterns. Both the subjective assessment and objective evaluations of synthetic aging sequences validate the effectiveness of the proposed model.