UNCW professor’s work featured in National Enquirer

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — UNCW Professor Karl Ricanek and his team worked with the National Enquirer to use their “Face My Age” software to age some popular celebrities. Ricanek is showing people what Hollywood’s most beautiful people will look like when they are old and gray in a recent story for the National Enquirer.

Ricanek is a computer science professor at UNCW. He said what they do is facial analytics which is different from facial recognition. He said facial analytics focuses on not identification but collecting information on the characteristics of someone’s face like age, gender and race.

“The software that we have now models the process of the face changing with time and everybody is slightly different, the way that their face will age, based on structure, based on genetics and based on behavior,” said Ricanek.

Ricanek said the National Enquirer contacted him to put his work to the test on the rich and famous.

“So what we did was age progressed these individuals,” said Ricanke. “Age progression basically takes an image and ages that image anywhere from 20 to 40 years.”

Ricanek said while it can be interesting to see what your favorite celebrity might look like years down the line that’s not their main goal.

“Face recognition just doesn’t work for children,” said Ricanek.

Ricanek said he wants to improve software that can age children, specifically missing or exploited children. He said children’s faces change so much as they get older so it can be difficult to age them. But he is up for the challenge.

“For us it’s sort of a deeper mission,” said Ricanek.  “When someone uploads a picture of a missing individual then the system will age it and finds all possible matches for the individual.”

Ricanek said something that is holding researchers back from developing a solid program to age children is funding.

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