Washington, Apr 13 (Agencies) : Parents, ever wondered how your kids will look when they grow up? New software can tell! Researchers have developed a new software that automatically generates images of a young child's face as it ages through a lifetime within seconds.
The technique is the first fully automated approach for ageing babies to adults that works with variable lighting, expressions and poses, researchers said.
Ageing photos of very young children from a single photo is considered the most difficult of all scenarios, so we wanted to focus specifically on this very challenging case," said Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, a University of Washington assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
"We took photos of children in completely unrestrained conditions and found that our method works remarkably well," Kemelmacher-Shlizerman said.
The shape and appearance of a baby's face - and variety of expressions - often change drastically by adulthood, making it hard to model and predict that change.
The new technique leverages the average of thousands of faces of the same age and gender, then calculates the visual changes between groups as they age to apply those changes to a new person's face.
More specifically, the software determines the average pixel arrangement from thousands of random Internet photos of faces in different age and gender brackets.
An algorithm then finds correspondences between the averages from each bracket and calculates the average change in facial shape and appearance between ages.
These changes are applied to a new child's photo to predict how they will appear for any subsequent age up to 80.
The software can run on a standard computer and takes about 30 seconds to generate results for one face.
The researchers tested their rendered images against those of 82 actual people photographed over a span of years.
In an experiment asking random users to identify the correct aged photo for each example, they found that users picked the automatically rendered photos about as often as the real-life ones.
"Our extensive user studies demonstrated age progression results that are so convincing that people can't distinguish them from reality," said co-author Steven Seitz, a UW professor of computer science and engineering.
"When shown images of an age-progressed child photo and a photo of the same person as an adult, people are unable to reliably identify which one is the real photo," Seitz said.
Real-life photos of children are difficult to age-progress, partly due to variable lighting, shadows, funny expressions and even milk moustaches.
To compensate for these effects, the algorithm first automatically corrects for tilted faces, turned heads and inconsistent lighting, then applies the computed shape and appearance changes to the new child's face.
Perhaps the most common application of age progression work is for rendering older versions of missing children, researchers said.