Mitigating Longitudinal Performance Degradation in Child Face Recognition Using Synthetic Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Hossain, Afzal, Schuckers, Stephanie
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Hossain, Afzal
Schuckers, Stephanie
author_facet Hossain, Afzal
Schuckers, Stephanie
contents Longitudinal face recognition in children remains challenging due to rapid and nonlinear facial growth, which causes template drift and increasing verification errors over time. This work investigates whether synthetic face data can act as a longitudinal stabilizer by improving temporal robustness of child face recognition models. Using an identity disjoint protocol on the Young Face Aging (YFA) dataset, we evaluate three settings: (i) pretrained MagFace embeddings without dataset specific fine-tuning, (ii) MagFace fine-tuned using authentic training faces only, and (iii) MagFace fine-tuned using a combination of authentic and synthetically generated training faces. Synthetic data is generated using StyleGAN2 ADA and incorporated exclusively within the training identities; a post generation filtering step is applied to mitigate identity leakage and remove artifact affected samples. Experimental results across enrollment verification gaps from 6 to 36 months show that synthetic-augmented fine tuning substantially reduces error rates relative to both the pretrained baseline and real only fine tuning. These findings provide a risk aware assessment of synthetic augmentation for improving identity persistence in pediatric face recognition.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_01689
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Longitudinal Performance Degradation in Child Face Recognition Using Synthetic Data
Hossain, Afzal
Schuckers, Stephanie
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Longitudinal face recognition in children remains challenging due to rapid and nonlinear facial growth, which causes template drift and increasing verification errors over time. This work investigates whether synthetic face data can act as a longitudinal stabilizer by improving temporal robustness of child face recognition models. Using an identity disjoint protocol on the Young Face Aging (YFA) dataset, we evaluate three settings: (i) pretrained MagFace embeddings without dataset specific fine-tuning, (ii) MagFace fine-tuned using authentic training faces only, and (iii) MagFace fine-tuned using a combination of authentic and synthetically generated training faces. Synthetic data is generated using StyleGAN2 ADA and incorporated exclusively within the training identities; a post generation filtering step is applied to mitigate identity leakage and remove artifact affected samples. Experimental results across enrollment verification gaps from 6 to 36 months show that synthetic-augmented fine tuning substantially reduces error rates relative to both the pretrained baseline and real only fine tuning. These findings provide a risk aware assessment of synthetic augmentation for improving identity persistence in pediatric face recognition.
title Mitigating Longitudinal Performance Degradation in Child Face Recognition Using Synthetic Data
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01689