Search Results (4)

Precise recognition of individual ovine specimens plays a pivotal role in implementing smart agricultural platforms and optimizing herd management systems. With the development of deep learning technology, sheep face recognition provides an efficient and contactless solution for individual sheep identification. However, with the growth of sheep, their facial features keep changing, which poses challenges for existing sheep face recognition models to maintain accuracy across the dynamic changes in facial features over time, making it difficult to meet practical needs. To address this limitation, we propose the lifelong biometric learning of the sheep face network (LBL-SheepNet), a feature decoupling network designed for continuous adaptation to ovine facial changes, and constructed a dataset of 31,200 images from 55 sheep tracked monthly from 1 to 12 months of age. The LBL-SheepNet model addresses dynamic variations in facial features during sheep growth through a multi-module architectural framework. Firstly, a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module enhances discriminative feature representation through adaptive channel-wise recalibration. Then, a nonlinear feature decoupling module employs a hybrid channel-batch attention mechanism to separate age-related features from identity-specific characteristics. Finally, a correlation analysis module utilizes adversarial learning to suppress age-biased feature interference, ensuring focus on age-invariant identifiers. Experimental results demonstrate that LBL-SheepNet achieves 95.5% identification accuracy and 95.3% average precision on the sheep face dataset. This study introduces a lifelong biometric learning (LBL) mechanism to mitigate recognition accuracy degradation caused by dynamic facial feature variations in growing sheep. By designing a feature decoupling network integrated with adversarial age-invariant learning, the proposed method addresses the performance limitations of existing models in long-term individual identification. Full article

Face recognition techniques have been widely employed in real-world biomimetics applications. However, traditional approaches have limitations in recognizing faces correctly with large age differences because of significant changes over age in the same person, leading to unsatisfactory recognition performance. To address this, previous studies propose to decompose and identify age and identity features independently in facial images across diverse age groups when optimizing the discriminative model so as to improve the age-invariant face recognition accuracy. Nevertheless, the interrelationships between these features make it difficult for the decomposition to disentangle them properly, thus compromising the recognition accuracy due to the interactive impacts on both features. To this end, this paper proposes a novel deep framework that incorporates a novel Hybrid Spatial-Channel Attention Module to facilitate the cross-age face recognition task. Particularly, the proposed module enables better decomposition of the facial features in both spatial and channel dimensions with attention mechanisms simultaneously while mitigating the impact of age variation on the recognition performance. Beyond this, diverse pooling strategies are also combined when applying those spatial and channel attention mechanisms, which allows the module to generate discriminative face representations while preserving complete information within the original features, further yielding sounder recognition accuracy. The proposed model is extensively validated through experiments on public face datasets such as CACD-VS, AgeDB-30, and FGNET, where the results show significant performance improvements compared to competitive baselines. Full article

Deep-learning-based, cross-age face recognition has improved significantly in recent years. However, when using the discriminative method, it is still challenging to extract robust age-invariant features that can reduce the interference caused by age. In this paper, we propose a novel, effective, attention-based feature decomposition model, the age-invariant features extraction network, which can learn more discriminative feature representations and reduce the disturbance caused by aging. Our method uses an efficient channel attention block-based feature decomposition module to extract age-independent identity features from facial representations. Our end-to-end framework learns the age-invariant features directly, which is more convenient and can greatly reduce training complexity compared with existing multi-stage training methods. In addition, we propose a direct sum loss function to reduce the interference of age-related features. Our method achieves a comparable and stable performance. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance on four benchmarked datasets over the state-of-the-art. We obtain the relative improvements of 0.06%, 0.2%, and 2.2% on the cross-age datasets CACD-VS, AgeDB, and CALFW, respectively, and a relative 0.03% improvement on a general dataset LFW. Full article

Demographic estimation of human face images involves estimation of age group, gender, and race, which finds many applications, such as access control, forensics, and surveillance. Demographic estimation can help in designing such algorithms which lead to better understanding of the facial aging process and face recognition. Such a study has two parts—demographic estimation and subsequent face recognition and retrieval. In this paper, first we extract facial-asymmetry-based demographic informative features to estimate the age group, gender, and race of a given face image. The demographic features are then used to recognize and retrieve face images. Comparison of the demographic estimates from a state-of-the-art algorithm and the proposed approach is also presented. Experimental results on two longitudinal face datasets, the MORPH II and FERET, show that the proposed approach can compete the existing methods to recognize face images across aging variations. Full article