Does Face Recognition Accuracy Get Better With Age? Deep Face Matchers Say No

TL;DR

This study reveals that modern deep face matchers perform worse on older individuals, contrasting with traditional results, and shows that training data balance does not improve accuracy for older age groups.

Contribution

It demonstrates that deep learning face matchers have lower accuracy for older persons and that training on older images does not enhance performance for that group.

Findings

Deep CNN matchers perform worse on older age groups.

Traditional matchers show higher accuracy for older persons.

Training data balance does not improve older persons' face recognition accuracy.

Abstract

Previous studies generally agree that face recognition accuracy is higher for older persons than for younger persons. But most previous studies were before the wave of deep learning matchers, and most considered accuracy only in terms of the verification rate for genuine pairs. This paper investigates accuracy for age groups 16-29, 30-49 and 50-70, using three modern deep CNN matchers, and considers differences in the impostor and genuine distributions as well as verification rates and ROC curves. We find that accuracy is lower for older persons and higher for younger persons. In contrast, a pre deep learning matcher on the same dataset shows the traditional result of higher accuracy for older persons, although its overall accuracy is much lower than that of the deep learning matchers. Comparing the impostor and genuine distributions, we conclude that impostor scores have a larger effect than genuine scores in causing lower accuracy for the older age group. We also investigate the effects of training data across the age groups. Our results show that fine-tuning the deep CNN models on additional images of older persons actually lowers accuracy for the older age group. Also, we fine-tune and train from scratch two models using age-balanced training datasets, and these results also show lower accuracy for older age group. These results argue that the lower accuracy for the older age group is not due to imbalance in the original training data.