A maximum entropy feature descriptor for age invariant face recognition

In this paper, we propose a new approach to overcome the representation and matching problems in age invariant face recognition. First, a new maximum entropy feature descriptor (MEFD) is developed that encodes the microstructure of facial images into a set of discrete codes in terms of maximum entropy. By densely sampling the encoded face image, sufficient discriminatory and expressive information can be extracted for further analysis. A new matching method is also developed, called identity factor analysis (IFA), to estimate the probability that two faces have the same underlying identity. The effectiveness of the framework is confirmed by extensive experimentation on two face aging datasets, MORPH (the largest public-domain face aging dataset) and FGNET. We also conduct experiments on the famous LFW dataset to demonstrate the excellent generalizability of our new approach.