Computational methods for modeling facial aging: A survey

Facial aging, a new dimension that has recently been added to the problem of face recognition, poses interesting theoretical and practical challenges to the research community. The problem which originally generated interest in the psychophysics and human perception community has recently found enhanced interest in the computer vision community. How do humans perceive age? What constitutes an age-invariant signature that can be derived from faces? How compactly can the facial growth event be described? How does facial aging impact recognition performance? In this paper, we give a thorough analysis on the problem of facial aging and further provide a complete account of the many interesting studies that have been performed on this topic from different fields. We offer a comparative analysis of various approaches that have been proposed for problems such as age estimation, appearance prediction, face verification, etc. and offer insights into future research on this topic. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.