Eigen-aging reference coding for cross-age face verification and retrieval

Recent works have achieved near or over human performance in traditional face recognition under PIE (pose, illumination and expression) variation. However, few works focus on the cross-age face recognition task, which means identifying the faces from same person at different ages. Taking human-aging into consideration broadens the application area of face recognition. It comes at the cost of making existing algorithms hard to maintain effectiveness. This paper presents a new reference based approach to address cross-age problem, called Eigen-Aging Reference Coding (EARC). Different from other existing reference based methods, our reference traces eigen faces instead of specific individuals. The proposed reference has smaller size and contains more useful information. To the best of our knowledge, we achieve state-of-the-art performance and speed on CACD dataset, the largest public face dataset containing significant aging information.