Development of Recognition Engine for Baby Faces

Existing face recognition approaches are mostly developed based on adult faces which may not work well in distinguishing faces of kids. Especially, baby faces tend to have common features such as round cheeks and chins, so that current face recognition engines often fail to differentiate them. In this paper, we present methods for discriminating baby faces from adult faces, and for training a special engine to recognize faces of different babies. To achieve these, we collected a huge number of baby face images and developed a software system to annotate the image database. Experimental results prove that the trained baby face recognizer achieves dramatic improvement on differentiating baby faces and the fusion of it with the conventional adult face recognition engine also works well on the overall data set containing both baby and adult faces.