Facial Age Synthesis With Label Distribution-Guided Generative Adversarial Network

The existing research work on facial age synthesis has been mostly focused on long-term aging (e.g., over an age span of 10 years or more). In this paper, we employ generative adversarial networks (GANs) as a tool to investigate age synthesis over different age spans. Compared with long-term aging, short-term age synthesis suffers from the reduced amount of available training data, which can severely hinder the model training. We conduct a series of experiments to validate this. To facilitate short-term age synthesis, we further propose label distribution-guided generative adversarial network (ldGAN), where each sample is associated with an age label distribution (ALD) rather than a single age group. Accordingly, each sample can contribute not only to the learning of its own age group but also to neighbouring groups’ learning. This is useful when addressing short-term aging to cope with the reduced amount of training data. In addition, unlike one-hot encoding which treats age groups as independent from one another, ldGAN can well capture the correlation among different age groups, so that smooth aging sequences can be achieved. The ALD model is integrated into GAN with a two-step process. Firstly, instead of the traditional one-hot encoding, ALD is applied as the condition of the generator. Secondly, we add a sequence of label distribution learners on top of several multi-scale discriminators, with the aim of minimizing the label distribution learning loss when optimizing both the generator and discriminators. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations are conducted to assess ldGAN’s ability in dealing with two core issues of face aging, i.e., aging effect generation and identity preservation. The obtained experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ldGAN in both learning short-term aging patterns and coping with the lack of training data.