“At Face Value”: age progression software provides personalised demonstration of the effects of smoking on appearance: Figure 1

Abstract

The study and development of software able to show the effect of aging of faces is one of the tasks of face recognition technologies. Some software solutions are used for investigations, some others to show the effects of drugs on healthy appearance, however some other applications can be proposed for the analysis of visual arts. Here we use a freely available software, which is providing interesting results, for the comparison of ancient marble busts. An analysis of Augustus busts is proposed.Face recognition software and technologies are focusing on the possibility of computer algorithms to recognize a face in some galleries of images, which can be acquired from pictures provided by still images or frames of a video sequence. The software algorithms then must reproduce the innate human ability to recognize a face, a fundamental task in mimic the behavior of the human brain. Another important research in the field of face recognition is the study of the effects of aging in the craniofacial morphology [1]. Human faces change during the life, their features varying affected by several factors ranging from the inherent genetics and the environmental constrains.As told in Ref.2, several agencies of investigation regularly require matching a probe image with the individuals in the missing person database. However, there are often significant differences between facial features of probe and gallery images due to age variation. For instance if the probe image is a 15 years-old boy or girl and the gallery image of the same person is of 5 years, the face recognition algorithm must perform a very difficult task.Researchers have then proposed several age simulation and modeling techniques [2]. These models alter the face according to the facial growth over a specific period of time. The reader can find several references given in [2], the oldest is that of Burt and Perrett [3]. Since the face aging is affecting the performance of face recognition systems, the analysis of synthetically generating age-progressed or age-regressed images is a good method of improving the robustness of face-based biometrics [1]. In Ref.4, the accuracy of methods for the security of biometric verification systems is investigated. The paper presents methods of modeling and predicting facial template aging based on matching score analysis. An interesting social application of a software solution for aging faces was proposed by the Task Force for Tobacco-Free Women and Girls in New York State, which utilized it to illustrate how smoking can affect the facial appearance [5]. The task force members reviewed the literature on the association between smoking and facial wrinkling, provided parameters for customization of the APRIL (age progression image launcher) [6]. Photoshop is also used for ageing the faces, using its FaceAge® plugin. However, this is not freely available. Some software solutions are then used for investigation, some others to show the effects of drugs on healthy appearance, however other applications can be imagined and used, for i...

How effective are physical appearance interventions in changing smoking perceptions, attitudes and behaviours? A systematic review

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“…In addition, design wise the study did not include a control group comparison. Note: some additional detail on the study by Hysert et al 24 has been derived from Mirand et al 29…”

Male smokers’ experiences of an appearance-focused facial-ageing intervention

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What is the scope to test a smoking cessation intervention aimed at young people admitted to hospital?

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