Age invariant face recognition based on texture embedded discriminative graph model

In an automatic face recognition system, it still remains a challenge to improve the robustness to aging. In this paper, we present a novel approach to address age invariant face recognition, by formulating it as a graph matching problem. In contrast to the majority of tasks in the literature that only make use of robust texture features, this method generates a graph from a set of fiducial landmarks of each face, which captures the texture clues that tend to be stable in a period as well as the common facial geometry configuration. The nodes of the graph denote the texture of a face area around a landmark, and the edges correspond to the geometry topology of the face. For each area, the age invariant texture information is extracted by a discriminative and compact feature encoded in the Local Gabor Binary Pattern Histogram Sequence (LGBPHS) projected in an LDA subspace. An objective function is then designed to match graphs for the purpose of registration and identification. Experiments are carried out on the FG-NET Aging database, and the results achieved outperform the state of the art ones, which clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in face recognition across age variations.