Synthesis of facial ageing transforms using three-dimensional morphable models
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30/11/2009Author
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Abstract
The ability to synthesise the effects of ageing in human faces has numerous uses from aiding
the search for missing people to improving recognition algorithms and aiding surgical
planning.
The principal contribution of this thesis is a novel method for synthesising the visual effects
of facial ageing using a training set of three-dimensional scans to train a statistical
ageing model. This data-base is constructed by fitting a statistical Face Model known as a
Morphable Model to a set of two dimensional photographs of a set of subjects at different
age points in their lives. We verify the effectiveness of this algorithm with both quantitative
and psychological evaluation. Most ageing research has concentrated on building models
using two-dimensional images. This has two major shortcomings, firstly some of the information
related to shape change may be lost by the projection to two-dimensions; secondly
the algorithms are very sensitive to even slight variations in pose and lighting. By using
standard face-fitting methods to fit a statistical face model to the image we overcome these
problems by reconstructing the lost shape information, and can use a model of physical
rotations and light transfer to overcome the issues of pose and rotation. We show that the
three-dimensional models captured by face-fitting offer an effective method of synthesising
facial ageing.
The second contribution is a new algorithm for ageing a face model based on Projection to
Latent Structures also known as Partial Least Squares. This method attempts to separate
the training set into a set of basis vectors that best explains the shape and colour changes
related to ageing from those factors within the training set that are unrelated to ageing. We
show that this method is more accurate than other linear techniques at producing a face
model that resembles the individual at the target age and of producing a face image of the
correct perceived age.
The third contribution is a careful evaluation of three well known ageing methods. We use
both quantitative evaluation to determine the accuracy of the ageing method, and perceptual
evaluation to determine how well the model performs in terms of perceived age increase
and also identity retention. We show that linear methods more accurately capture ageing
and identity information if they are trained using an individualised model, and that ageing
is more accurately captured if PLS is used to train the model.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
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Description of related resources
David W. Hunter and Bernard P. Tiddeman. Visual ageing of human faces in three dimensions using morphable models and projection to latent structures. In VISAPP 2009: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, Lisboa, Portugal, February 05-08, 2009, 2009. to appear.
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