Want to know how you'll look like when you get older? The researchers at the University of Washington have developed a new technique for simulating the aging process over nearly eight decades.

They used a technique called "illumination-aware age progression", which requires only one initial photograph. It will automatically produce a series of age-progressed outputs between 1 and 80 years of age.


Take a look at the output below. It is very impressive indeed. Has real-life science caught up to Hollywood makeup effects?



The left-hand photos in the photo above show the sequence of how a child's face would have been if modeled by the algorithm. It does not predict what the future face will look like, and the researchers point out that the age progressed simulated faces you see have been "composited into the ground truth photo to match the hairstyle and the background".

There is still some way to go, but the compositing in the final results show the changes you can see similarities with. Check out the photo below:



Researchers Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, and Steven M. Seitz—describe it that "these averages depict a prototype man and woman aging from 0 to 80, under any desired illumination, and capture the differences in shape and texture between ages. Applying these differences to a new photo yields an age progressed result."



They need to make an app out of this. STAT! [University of Washington]