Cross-Age Face Verification Using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) with Landmark Feature

Cross-age face verification is a complex problem in biometric recognition in terms of aging, a naturally changing face structure, and face landmark configuration changes over time. In this paper, a new cross-age face verification method is proposed with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and a mix of landmark-based features. Realistic aging of a face with identity-specific landmarks, such as eyes, nose, and mouth, is generated for effective face recognition in a range of age groups. Performance testing with an in-house collected face dataset of 200 face images exhibited effectiveness in changing face configuration and face shape transformations, such as a fuller face thinning and thin face becoming fuller. Comparison with direct face verification showed increased values of similarity, such as 32.57% to 63.80%, reduced values of feature distance, such as 0.6743 to 0.3620, and improvement in accuracy for the ArcFace, VGG-Face, and Facenet architectures. ArcFace exhibited an improvement in accuracy with an increase in value from 82.64% to 86.02%, VGG-Face with an improvement in value from 76.23% to 80.57%, and Facenet with an improvement in value from 67.54% to 74.48%. These observations validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in overcoming age-related complications and improving cross-age face verification performance. In future work, we plan to investigate a larger dataset and model refinement to realize performance improvement and real-life biometric suitability.