Abstract
Describing time-variant appearance of object surface is still an open problem. With intricate environmental factors and different material characteristics over time, no researcher did tackle the principal problem: how to formulate time-variant change on general surface appearance? In this paper, we attempt to solve this challenging issue. Using multilinear algebra representation, we propose a novel appearance model and characterize the surface-specific and time-variant properties. When given an unknown sample, we propose a robust method to estimate its aging degree. In addition, we also propose an approach to synthesize its realistic appearance changes even when the material of this given sample does not exist in our database. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed approach. To the best of our knowledge, this challenging issue is first explored in image processing applications. © 2011 IEEE.