SBIR Phase I: 3D Modeling Facial Aging Effect for Enhancing Facial Recognition Performance

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I research project will develop a novel three-dimensional facial modeling approach to simulate the facial aging effect of human subjects for enhancing facial recognition performance. Despite many advances made in facial recognition technologies, existing system performance is still very sensitive to certain changes between the enrollment image and probe images. These factors include pose, lighting, and expression. The recent Facial Recognition Vendor Tests (FRVT) 2002 performed by 16 US Government agencies quantitatively document another important factor: It shows a 5% drop of performance per year due to the facial changes between the time when a subject's image is taken and the time when the system captures a new image and performs recognition. The SBIR proposal will develop a unique 3D face modeling and computerized age progression/regression technique to solve this problem. This unique technology, when fully developed, is able to eliminate performance deterioration due to aged images in the database and enable robust, field deployments of facial recognition systems in real-world applications.The proposed product could have a big impact with Homeland Security as well other security related applications. Local, federal and international law enforcement groups will benefit from being able to identify people they have not "seen" in a long period of time.