Detailed face ageing with morphable models

This thesis is about the automatic, photorealistic, and detailed ageing of faces in images. Morphable Models of the face provide a distribution over 3D face shape and texture and are often used for this task. However, they only model features that are at the same location between individuals, which is not the case of wrinkles, spots, pores, and other high-frequency details. We propose a face ageing model capable of producing detailed age progressed images showing global shape and skin tone changes, as well as details and self-shadowing effects. Our face ageing approach consists of different parts that we combine into a single ageing simulation. 1) Ageing in Morphable Model space providing the coarse shape deformation and skin tone change associated with age. 2) An efficient global illumination model making renderings more realistic with self-shadowing. 3) Detail synthesis by transferring the high-frequency parts from a selected example face scan. 4) A wrinkle propagation model to make the transfer specific to wrinkle growth. 5) A stochastic pigment spot model to introduce the spots known to appear with age. We evaluate parts of the approach with a perception experiment showing that the resulting images are perceived as older and similarly realistic as real ones. With the resulting model, we age faces in portrait images and achieve photorealistic results showing detailed face ageing.