Towards Age-Invariant Face Recognition

Despite the remarkable progress in face recognition related technologies, reliably recognizing faces across ages remains a big challenge. The appearance of a human face changes substantially over time, resulting in significant intra-class variations. As opposed to current techniques for age-invariant face recognition, which either directly extract age-invariant features for recognition, or first synthesize a face that matches target age before feature extraction, we argue that it is more desirable to perform both tasks jointly so that they can leverage each other. To this end, we propose a deep Age-Invariant Model (AIM) for face recognition in the wild with three distinct novelties. First, AIM presents a novel unified deep architecture jointly performing cross-age face synthesis and recognition in a mutual boosting way. Second, AIM achieves continuous face rejuvenation/aging with remarkable photorealistic and identity-preserving properties, avoiding the requirement of paired data and the true age of testing samples. Third, effective and novel training strategies are developed for end-to-end learning of the whole deep architecture, which generates powerful age-invariant face representations explicitly disentangled from the age variation. Moreover, we construct a new large-scale Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) benchmark dataset to facilitate existing efforts and push the frontiers of age-invariant face recognition research. Extensive experiments on both our CAFR dataset and several other cross-age datasets (MORPH, CACD, and FG-NET) demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AIM model over the state-of-the-arts. Benchmarking our model on the popular unconstrained face recognition datasets YTF and IJB-C additionally verifies its promising generalization ability in recognizing faces in the wild.