Face Verification With Age Progression Using Discriminative Method and Gradient Orientation Pyramid

International Journal of Advance Foundation and Research in Computer (IJAFRC)
Volume 2, Issue 8, August - 2015. ISSN 2348 4853, Impact Factor 1.317
Face Verification with Age Progression using Discriminative

Method and Gradient Orientation Pyramid
1Piyush
1Dept
D. Hegu, 2Pradnya J. Suryawanshi

of E & TC, Assistant Professor,Jawaharlal Darda Institute of Engineering & Technology, Yavatmal
2Dept of Electronics, Assistant Professor, Priyadarshini College of Engineering, Nagpur
1piyush.hegu@gmail.com, 2pradnyajs@rediffmail.com
ABSTRACT
Facial analysis with respect to age verification while considering several face related challenges is
one of the open problems in computer vision system, as already so many good algorithms exists
for face verification with age progression. The human face is the premier biometric in the field of
human recognition because of its easy acquisition. In this paper, we propose a methodology for
real time facial image analysis and verification across age progression. There are several
challenges in face verification like different poses, expressions, backgrounds and illumination
conditions because of which the task becomes difficult. The facial image is processed using
support vector machine which is an example of discriminative model used in the machine
learning. The effective and simple representation can be obtained by finding gradient
orientation of a facial image, so first it needs to calculate Gradient orientation (GO). This
representation is improved when image is represented in pyramidal form, which results in
the use of the gradient orientation pyramid ( GOP). This is then combined with a support vector
machine (SVM) to give excellent performance. This work explains how age differences and the
other factors such as image quality, spectacles, and facial hair affect recognition algorithms.
Index Terms: Face verification, age progression, gradient orientation pyramid, support vector machine
I.
INTRODUCTION
Face verification is an important pattern verification problem in the study of both natural and artificial
learning systems. As a pattern, the face is a challenging object to analyze. Anatomically, it is rigid enough
so that all faces have same structure. However, each face is unique due to the shape, size and placement
of features (e.g. separation of eyes), gender and race. The problem is made further difficult due to
variations that arise as a consequence of changing expressions, illumination conditions, accessories,
cosmetics and aging. A face verification system generally consists of four modules (as shown in Fig. 1):
Face Detection, Face Normalization, Face Feature Extraction and Face Feature Matching.
Human face recognition finds application in a wide range of fields such as automatic video
surveillance, criminal identification, credit cards and security systems to name just a few.
Figure 1. Face Verification System
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The requirements of a good face recognition algorithm a r e high recognition rates, tolerance towards
various environmental factors such as illumination, facial poses, facial expressions, image backgrounds,
image scales, human ageing and also good computational and space complexity.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
Ramanathan & Chelleppa [9] proposed a Bayesian age-difference classifier that is built on a probabilistic
eigenspaces framework. Zhou & Georgescu [10] presented general IBR (Image based Regression) using
boosting to select relevant features from the image. Also tested the proposed IBR algorithm on Age
estimation, Pulmonary Tumor detection & endocardial wall localization. Ramanathan and Chelleppa [9]
use a face growing model for face verification task for people under age of 18. Richa Singh & Afzel Noore
[11] proposed a Novel Age transformation algorithm to handle the challenge of facial aging in face
recognition. Xin Gerg and Kate Smith-Miles [2] proposed automatic age estimation method AGES (Aging
Pattern Subspace), depends on many landmark points on face that should be determined by Landmark
algorithm. Guodong Guo & Thomas Huang [3] introduce the age manifold learning scheme for extracting
face aging features & design a locally adjusted robust regressor for learning & prediction of human ages.
Tong & Jain [6] proposed 3D facial aging modeling and simulation method for aging invariant face
recognition. The method is capable of modeling growth pattern as well as adult aging. Roma Biswas and
Chelleppa [1] proposed feature drifting on face images at different ages and applies it to face verification
tasks. Montillo & Ling [5] proposed the application of Random Forests for age regression. This method
performs age regression using information related to anthropometric measurements instead of defining
a complex craniofacial model. Andreas Lantis [7] proposed Statistical model to capture variation of facial
shapes over age progression which is then used for age estimation and Face verification.
The above methods can be roughly categorized as generative methods. It is a model of randomly
generated observable data. Generative models are used in machine learning for modeling data directly.
Above methods use the 68 landmarks that are pre-labeled for each photo in the FGnet dataset.
Furthermore, both age estimation and age simulation are still open problems and may bring
instabilities to the generative methods. To avoid these problems, we study discriminative methods that
directly tackle the face verification problem.
Discriminative model, also called conditional models, are a class both age estimation and age simulation
are still open problems and may bring instabilities to the generative methods. To avoid these problems,
we study discriminative methods that directly tackle the face verification problem.
Figure 2. Above row contains images having different facial expressions and related issues (including
spectacles, facial hairs, and image quality) second row contains images from FGnet dataset having different
age groups.
III. TASK AND CHALLENGES

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The task of our study is two-fold. The first is to investigate representations and algorithms for
verification. The second is to study the effect of age differences and the other factors such as image
quality, spectacles, and facial hair on verification algorithms. We use three datasets in our study. Two of
them are passport datasets involving more than 1,800 subjects. We also use the FG-NET Aging Database
that is widely used for image based face aging analysis.
The challenges of face verification across age progression are due to several sources. The first source is
the biometric change over years, including facial texture (wrinkles), shape (weight gain, weight loss)
and facial hair (mustache and beard), presence of glasses, scars, etc. The second source is the change in
the image acquisition conditions and environment, including the illumination conditions, the image
quality change caused by using different cameras, etc. Some examples of these challenges are shown in
Fig. 2
IV. CONTRIBUTION
In this study we make several contributions. First, we propose using the gradient orientation pyramid (GOP)
for the task. We show that, when combined with the support vector machine, GOP demonstrates excellent
performance for face verification with age gaps. The pyramid technique is used to capture hierarchical
information that further improves the representation. Then, for a given face image pair, we use the
cosines between gradient orientations at all scales to build the feature vector. The feature vector is then
combined with an SVM for face verification.
Our second contribution is thorough empirical experiments. We evaluated nine different approaches,
including two baseline methods (l2 norm and gradient orientation), four different representations with
the same SVM-based framework (intensity difference, gradient with magnitude, gradient orientation, and
GOP), the Bayesian face, and two commercial face verification systems. The evaluations are conducted
on the three datasets mentioned above. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest reported
evaluation in both the size of dataset and the number of tested methods.
Our third contribution is the empirical study of how verification performance varies with increasing
age gaps and related issues. We found that the difficulty of verification produced by age gaps becomes
saturated for the gap in between four years up to age gap of ten years. This is observed with different
image representations that have been tested. In addition, on the FGnet dataset, we observed that the
image quality and presence of eye glasses bring more challenges than facial hair.
V. PROBLEM FORMULATION
A. Face Verification Framework
In this paper, we study face verification tasks. In verification, one must determine whether two images
come from the same person, as opposed to recognition, in which an individual is identified from a
large gallery of individuals. An advantage of this problem is that it does not require many images for
each subject, which is often difficult for collections across aging. Given an input image pair I1 and I2, the
task is to assign the pair as either intra-personal (i.e. I1 and I2 from the same people) or extra-personal
(i.e. I1 and I2 from different individuals). We use a support vector machine (SVM). Specifically, given an
image pair (I1 , I2 ), it is first mapped onto the feature space as
[x= F (I1, I2)] Rn
(1)
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where, x Rn is the feature vector extracted from the image pair (I1 , I2 ) through the feature
extraction function F: I I Rn , I is the set of all images, and Rn forms the n-dimensional feature
space. Then SVM is used to divide the feature space into two classes, one for intra-personal pairs and the
other for extra-personal pairs. We denote the separating boundary with the following equation
Ns
( i yi K (Si, x) + b) =
(2)
i=1
Where, Ns is the number of support vectors and si is the ith support vector. is used to trade off the
correct reject rate and correct accept rate as described in (3) and (4). K (.,.) is the kernel function that
provides SVM with non-linear abilities. In our experiments, we use the LibSVM library. For verification
tasks, the correct reject rate (CRR) and the correct acceptance rate (CAR) are two critical criteria,
CRR = # correctly rejected extra personal pairs/ # total extra personal pairs
(3)
CAR = # correctly accepted intra personal pairs/ # total intra personal pairs
(4)
Where accept indicates that the input image pair are from the same subject and reject indicates the
opposite. In addition, the equal error rate (EER), defined as the error rate when a solution has the same
CAR and CRR, is frequently used to measure verification performance.
B. Gradient Orientation And Gradient Orientation Pyramid
Gradient-based representations are recently widely used in computer vision and pattern recognition
tasks. We discard gradient magnitude information and use only orientations, which demonstrates
significant improvement in our experiments. Furthermore, the gradient directions at different scales are
combined to make a hierarchical representation.
(a) Image I (b) Pyramid P(I)
(c) GOP
(d) G(I)
Figure 3. Computation of a GOP from an input image I
Given an image I(p), where p = (x; y) indicates pixel locations, we first define the pyramid of I as
P(I) = {I (p; )}s =0 with:
I (p; 0) = I (p),
I (p; ) = [I (p; -1) * (p)] 2 = 1,....,s, (5)
Where (p) is the Gaussian kernel,* denotes the convolution operator, 2 denotes half size
downsampling, and s is the number of pyramid layers. Note that in (5) the notation I is used both for the
original image and the images at different scales for convenience.
Then, the gradient orientation at each scale is defined by its normalized gradient vectors at each pixel.
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g (I( p; )) = (I (p, ))/ | (I (p, ))|

(0, 0) otherwise
if | (I (p, ))| >

(6)
Where, is a threshold for dealing with flat pixels. The gradient orientation pyramid (GOP) of I, is
naturally defined as G(I) = stack({g(I(p, ))} s =0 ) Rn*2 that maps I to a d * 2 representation, where stack
(.) is used for stacking gradient orientations of all pixels across all scales and n is the total number of
pixels. Fig. 3 illustrates the computation of a GOP from an input image.
C. Kernels Between GOPs
Given an image pair (I1; I2) and corresponding GOPs (G1 = G (I1); G2 = G (I2)), the feature vector x = F (I1;
I2) is computed as the cosines of the difference between gradient orientations at all pixels over scales.
x = F (I1, I2) = (G1
G2)
(7)
Where is the element-wise product. Next, we apply the Gaussian kernel to the extracted feature x to be
used with the SVM framework. Specifically, our kernel is defined as
K (x1, x2) = exp (-|x1- x2|2)
(8)
Where is a parameter determining the size of RBF kernels ( = 1/n is used in our experiments). In the
rest of the paper, we use SVM+GOP to indicate the proposed approach.
VI. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 4. Images from FGnet database (a) facial image 1 (age 24 years) (b) feature image 1 (24 years) (c)
facial image 2 (age 67 years) (d) feature image 2 (age 67 years)
(a)
(b)
Figure 5: Feature matrix components (a) Image 1 (24 years) (b) Image 2 (67 years)
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(a)
(b)
Figure 6. (a) Final matching Results of two images (b) Command window showing matching percentage
In the first phase of experimental results, we compare the images from FGnet database of same person at
two different ages (24 and 67 years). Figure 5 shows feature matrix components of two images from
which the different intensity values can be observed, which can be used for calculating matching
percentage. The final result showing the best matching with the selected face image (Figure 6(b))
whereas figure 6(b) shows the matching percentage with the other image.
The age difference between two images is so much (i.e. 43 years) but still we got the matching percentage
of about 80% by comparing different intensity values of these images. So, here we are close to perfection
for identifying images having larger age differences.
(a)
(b)
(d)
(e)
(c)
(f)
Figure 7. Images from FGnet database (a) Image 1 of 1972 (age 1 year) (b) Image 2 of 1975 (age 4 years) (c)
Image 3 of 1989 (age 18 years) (d) Image 4 of 1994 (age 23 years) (e) Image 5 of 2003 (age 32 years) (f)
Image 6 of 2011 (age 40 years)
(a)
(b)
Figure 8: Feature matrix components (a) Image 3 (18 years) (b) Image 8 (40 years)
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(a)
(b)
Figure 9. (a) final matching Results of two images (b) Command window showing matching percentage
In the second phase of experimental results, we compare the images from FGnet database of same person
at different age groups (from age 1- 40 years having age differences of 3-8 years).The final result showing
the best matching with the selected face image (Figure 9(a)) whereas figure 9(b) shows the matching
percentage with the other images from this the best match is selected which is indicated by red box.
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
Figure 10. Face images of same person having different face related changes ((a): Normal Image (d): change
of expressions, (b): presence of spectacle, (c): change of position, (e): change of image acquisition
conditions)
Figure 11: Final matching result
(a)
(b)
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Figure 12: (a) Command window showing total number of entries in the database (b) Command window
showing matching percentage with other images
In the third phase of experimental results, we compare the images of same person having different face
related changes (such as change of facial expressions, change of image acquisition conditions, presence of
spectacles, and change of facial position) with the normal face. So from this comparison we got the
matching percentage of normal image with different images which can be shown in figure 12(b). The final
result with best matching percentage of 91.089% is shown in figure 11.
From above experimental results, it is clear that the face verification with age progression with best
matching from FGnet aging database and passport database can be achieved
Table 1. Comparative result of different approaches
VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper the problem of face verification with age variation using discriminative method and
gradient orientation pyramid is studied. First, we proposed a robust face descriptor, the gradient
orientation pyramid, for face verification tasks across ages. Compared to previously used descriptors
such as image intensity, the new descriptor is more robust and performs well on face images with large
age differences. In our experiments with comparison to several techniques, the new approach
demonstrated very promising results on two challenging passport databases and the FGnet dataset. In
addition, being a discriminative approach, the proposed method requires no prior age knowledge and
does not rely on age estimation and simulation algorithms. Second, the effect of the aging process on
verification algorithms is studied empirically. In the experiments we observed that the difficulty of face
verification algorithms saturated after the age gap is larger than four years (up to ten years). We also
studied the effects of age related issues including image quality, presence of spectacles, and facial hair.
VIII.
FUTURE WORK
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We plan to investigate several directions in our future work. First of all, testing on a large public dataset
will be conducted for deeper understanding of the proposed approaches. We plan to work on the MORPH
dataset for this purpose. Second, we plan to apply other discriminative approaches (e.g., boosting) for
simultaneous feature analysis and classification. The most important is to create and analyze our own
database form our region so as to contribute one step ahead towards the research in facial verification
and recognition technology.
IX. REFERENCES
[1]
S. Biswas, G. Aggarwal, N. Ramanathan, and R. Chellappa, A nongenerative approach for face

recognition across aging, Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems, 2008. BTAS 2008. 2nd
IEEE International Conference on, pp. 16, 29 2008-Oct. 1 2008.
[2]
X. Geng, Z.-H. Zhou, and K. Smith-Miles, Automatic age estimation based on facial aging patterns,
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., vol. 29, no. 12, pp. 22342240, 2007.
[3]
G. Guo, Y. Fu, C. R. Dyer, and T. S. Huang, Image-based human age estimation by manifold
learning and locally adjusted robust regression, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 17,
no. 7, pp. 11781188, 2008.
[4]
G. Guo, G. Mu, Y. Fu, and T. S. Huang, Human age estimation using bio-inspired features, in IEEE
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2009.
[5]
A. Montillo and H. Ling, Age regression from faces using random forests, in IEEE International
Conference on Image Processing, 2009,to appear.
[6]
U. Park, Y. Tong, and A. K. Jain, Face recognition with temporal invariance: A 3d aging model. in
International Conference on Face & Gesture Recognition (FG), 2008.
[7]
A. Lanitis, C. J. Taylor, and T. F. Cootes, Toward automatic simulation of aging effects on face
images. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 442455, 2002.
[8]
N. Ramanathan and R. Chellappa, Face verification across age progression, IEEE Transactions on
Image Processing, vol. 15, no. 11, pp. 33493361, 2006.
[9]
Modeling age progression in young faces, in IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern
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[10]
S. K. Zhou, B. Georgescu, X. S. Zhou, and D. Comaniciu, Image based regression using boosting
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[11]
R. Singh, M. Vatsa, A. Noore, and S. K. Singh, Age transformation for improving face recognition
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AUTHOR PROFILE
Piyush D. Hegu was born in Yavatmal, Maharashtra state, India, in 1987. He received
the B.E. degree in Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering from SGB Amravati
University, Amravati in 2009 and M.Tech. Degree in VLSI from RTM Nagpur University,
Nagpur. He is working as an assistant Professor in Jawaharlal Darda Institute of
Engineering & Technology, Yavatmal. He has published total 15 papers in National and
International journals. His research areas includes VLSI design, Microprocessor and
Microcontroller, Image processing.
Pradnya J. Suryawanshi was born in Nagpur, Maharashtra state, India, in 1976. She
received the B.E. degree in Electronics Engineering from RTM Nagpur University,
Nagpur in 1998 and M.Tech. degree in Electronics from RTM Nagpur University, Nagpur
in 2005. Since 2005, she has been an Assistant Professor with the Electronics
Engineering Department at Priyadarshini College of Engineering & Technology, Nagpur.
She has authored 5 books and awarded with 4 teaching awards. She has published total
23 papers in National and International journals.
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International Journal of Advance Foundation and Research in Computer (IJAFRC)