The role of geometry in age estimation

Understanding and modeling of aging in human faces is an important problem in many real-world applications such as biometrics, authentication, and synthesis. In this paper, we consider the role of geometric attributes of faces, as described by a set of landmark points on the face, in age perception. Towards this end, we show that the space of landmarks can be interpreted as a Grassmann manifold. Then the problem of age estimation is posed as a problem of function estimation on the manifold. The warping of an average face to a given face is quantified as a velocity vector that transforms the average to a given face along a smooth geodesic in unit-time. This deformation is then shown to contain important information about the age of the face. We show in experiments that exploiting geometric cues in a principled manner provides comparable performance to several systems that utilize both geometric and textural cues. We show results on age estimation using the standard FG-Net dataset and a passport dataset which illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.