Dual reference age synthesis

Age synthesis methods typically take a single image as input and use a specific number to control the age of the generated image. In this paper, we propose a novel framework taking two images as inputs, named dual-reference age synthesis (DRAS), which approaches the task differently; instead of using “hard” age information, i.e. a fixed number, our model determines the target age in a “soft” way, by employing a second reference image. Specifically, the proposed framework consists of an identity agent, an age agent and a generative adversarial network. It takes two images as input – an identity reference and an age reference – and outputs a new image that shares corresponding features with each. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets (UTKFace and CACD) demonstrate the appealing performance and flexibility of the proposed framework.