Aspects of Age Variation in Facial Morphology Affecting Biometrics

There is a great degree of variation that occurs in the face during aging of adults that will affect outcomes for face- based biometric systems. These changes have been studied sporadically in anthropological research and have received even less attention in biometric-related literature. This paper presents a summary of recent research that spans biometric, forensic, and anthropologic literature in an attempt to unify a variety of findings related to adult aging, discusses work in synthesizing images of aged faces and its relation to the anthropological findings, and also presents work demonstrating a need for further study in this area to improve face-based biometric techniques. Only age-invariant or aging-aware methods will have the best success in longer stretches of time.