Example based facial aging simulation via facial detail transfer

The key problem of the facial aging simulation is protecting the identity information during the texture synthesizing procedure. In this paper, we address the aging simulation problem by using the facial detail transfer method, which provides a fundamental view of the aging simulation problem and shows its superiority in the small dataset. The proposed method decomposes the facial image into several layers, namely, structure layer, detail layer and color layer. The structure layer protects the identity information of the test image, while the detail layer contains the age information from the selected template image. We transfer the detail layer from the example images to the test images to generate the aging effects on the synthesized images. The images near the target age are also considered in the proposed method to further refine the synthesized results in the aging sequence. Experimental results conducted on the FG-NET database, Morph database and the IRIP-Aging database show that the proposed method can not only protect the identity information and the age information, but also generate more smooth aging sequence, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.