Bacteria Foraging Fusion for Face Recognition across Age Progression

The phenomenon of "aging" in humans leads to significant variations in facial features. Various factors such as bone growth, ethnicity and dietary habits influence the facial aging pattern. This increases the difficulty in performing automated face recognition. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that improves the performance of face recognition by applying the bacteria foraging fusion algorithm. The proposed algorithm mitigates the effect of facial changes caused due to aging by combining the LBP features of global and local facial regions at match score level, by means of the bacteria foraging fusion algorithm. Experimental results are presented using the FG-Net and IIITDelhi face aging databases. The IIITDelhi database, which has been collected by the authors, consists of over 2600 age-separated labeled face images of 102 individuals. To account for real life and natural conditions, images include changes in the face due to illumination, pose, and presence of accessories such as eyeglasses. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional fusion schemes, existing algorithms and a commercial system.