Human Aging MOS Study

Information and Key Questions

Purpose of this MOS study

Humans can help validate the effectiveness of synthetic aging techniques and how realistic (no artifacts or aberrations) the resulting data samples are as compared to real human faces. In this research, we are doing a survey to evaluate the various synthetic aging methods. In the survey, you will be asked a series of questions to explore the quality of generated synthetic age data compared with real data samples.

What type(s) of data will be collected?

We will ask you to complete an anonymous questionnaire which will include questions on your attitude toward the synthetic age data.

You will be shown a number of faces. These are derived from an original facial image that is publicly available and several of the images will be modified by aging or de-aging algorithms. You will be asked to compare a group of 3-5 faces depending on the specific question and answer a specific question, make a selection of one or more faces, or evaluate one or more characteristics of a face (e.g. what is the relative age of a sequence of faces of the same person).

The questions will focus on the quality of the synthetic data and the aging effect. All the questions are based on your subjective decision.

How is my data stored, processed and utilized?

Your responses to this survey are anonymous and your identity information is not collected during this from the survey. All the results from the survey will be securely stored. Only research group members will have access to the data. After the statistical analysis of this data it will be permanently deleted.

Note that we do not collect personal data from participants.

The data will be processed consistent with the University of Galway's Data Protection Policy. More information could be found at this link: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/data-protection/.

What are the data security & privacy risks if I participate in this study?

Your participation in this study is voluntary and greatly appreciated. We do not foresee any risks associated with participation in the anonymous questionnaire.

How will I benefit from participationg in this study?

There is no direct benefit to you from participating in this study.

We expect that this study will provide useful results that will help improve the robustness of authentication algorithms to facial aging. This is important for consumer devices that are personalized to their end user and may become an important component of devices such as smartphones, speakers, and TV panels in the future. Thus there may be indirect benefits in the longer term.

Who is responsible for executing this study?

The PI responsible for this study is Professor Peter Corcoran from the School of Engineering and Director of the C3I Center.

The study itself is designed and executed by Ph.D. student Wang Yao and post-doc Muhammad Ali Farooq, both of them are from the School of Engineering and C3I Center at the University of Galway.