A Discriminative Model for Age Invariant Face Recognition

Aging variation poses a serious problem to automatic face recognition systems. Most of the face recognition studies that have addressed the aging problem are focused on age estimation or aging simulation. Designing an appropriate feature representation and an effective matching framework for age invariant face recognition remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a discriminative model to address face matching in the presence of age variation. In this framework, we first represent each face by designing a densely sampled local feature description scheme, in which scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and multi-scale local binary patterns (MLBP) serve as the local descriptors. By densely sampling the two kinds of local descriptors from the entire facial image, sufficient discriminatory information, including the distribution of the edge direction in the face image (that is expected to be age invariant) can be extracted for further analysis. Since both SIFT-based local features and MLBP-based local features span a high-dimensional feature space, to avoid the overfitting problem, we develop an algorithm, called multi-feature discriminant analysis (MFDA) to process these two local feature spaces in a unified framework. The MFDA is an extension and improvement of the LDA using multiple features combined with two different random sampling methods in feature and sample space. By random sampling the training set as well as the feature space, multiple LDA-based classifiers are constructed and then combined to generate a robust decision via a fusion rule. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms a state-of-the-art commercial face recognition engine on two public domain face aging data sets: MORPH and FG-NET. We also compare the performance of the proposed discriminative model with a generative aging model. A fusion of discriminative and generative models further improves the face matching accuracy in the presence of aging.