Face retrieval has received much attention over the past few decades, and many efforts have been made in retrieving face images against pose, illumination, and expression variations. However, the conventional works fail to meet the requirements of a potential and novel task---retrieving a person's face image at a specific age, especially when the specific "age" is not given as a numeral, i.e. "retrieving someone's image at the similar age period shown by another person's image." To tackle this problem, we propose a dual reference face retrieval framework in this paper, where the system takes two inputs: an identity reference image which indicates the target identity and an age reference image which reflects the target age. In our framework, the raw images are first projected on a joint manifold, which preserves both the age and identity locality. Then two similarity metrics of age and identity are exploited and optimized by utilizing our proposed quartet-based model. The experiments show promising results, outperforming hierarchical methods.

The emergence of low-cost sensing architectures for diverse modalities has made it possible to deploy sensor networks that acquire large amounts of very high-dimensional data. To cope with such a data deluge, manifold models are often developed that provide a powerful theoretical and algorithmic framework for capturing the intrinsic structure of data governed by a low-dimensional set of parameters. However, these models do not typically take into account dependencies among multiple sensors. We thus propose a new joint manifold framework for data ensembles that exploits such dependencies. We show that joint manifold structure can lead to improved performance for manifold learning. Additionally, we leverage recent results concerning random projections of manifolds to formulate a universal, network-scalable dimensionality reduction scheme that efficiently fuses the data from all sensors.