A research on cross-age facial recognition technology based on AT-GAN

Guangxuan Chen; Xingyuan Peng; Ruoyi Xu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0322280

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionDecember 12, 2024
12 Dec 2024 Author Response https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322280.r001
16 Jan 2025 Decision Letter - Zeeshan Ahmad, Editor PONE-D-24-57436A Research on Cross-Age Facial Recognition Technology Based on AT-GANPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Peng, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. ============================== ACADEMIC EDITOR: The novel contributions of the paper can be more better highlighted and explained in a systematic way. Language editing/proof-reading may help to improve the readability and overall quality of the paper The methodology and experimental section need major revision. ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 02 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols . We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Zeeshan Ahmad Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please note that PLOS ONE has specific guidelines on code sharing for submissions in which author-generated code underpins the findings in the manuscript. In these cases, we expect all author-generated code to be made available without restrictions upon publication of the work. Please review our guidelines at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/materials-and-software-sharing#loc-sharing-code and ensure that your code is shared in a way that follows best practice and facilitates reproducibility and reuse. 3. In this instance it seems there may be acceptable restrictions in place that prevent the public sharing of your minimal data. However, in line with our goal of ensuring long-term data availability to all interested researchers, PLOS’ Data Policy states that authors cannot be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-acceptable-data-sharing-methods). Data requests to a non-author institutional point of contact, such as a data access or ethics committee, helps guarantee long term stability and availability of data. Providing interested researchers with a durable point of contact ensures data will be accessible even if an author changes email addresses, institutions, or becomes unavailable to answer requests. Before we proceed with your manuscript, please also provide non-author contact information (phone/email/hyperlink) for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. If no institutional body is available to respond to requests for your minimal data, please consider if there any institutional representatives who did not collaborate in the study, and are not listed as authors on the manuscript, who would be able to hold the data and respond to external requests for data access? If so, please provide their contact information (i.e., email address). Please also provide details on how you will ensure persistent or long-term data storage and availability. 4. PLOS requires an ORCID iD for the corresponding author in Editorial Manager on papers submitted after December 6th, 2016. Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. 5. Please amend either the abstract on the online submission form (via Edit Submission) or the abstract in the manuscript so that they are identical. 6. We note that Figures 6,7,10,12,13,14,15 and 16 includes an image of a participant in the study. As per the PLOS ONE policy (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research) on papers that include identifying, or potentially identifying, information, the individual(s) or parent(s)/guardian(s) must be informed of the terms of the PLOS open-access (CC-BY) license and provide specific permission for publication of these details under the terms of this license. Please download the Consent Form for Publication in a PLOS Journal (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=8ce6/plos-consent-form-english.pdf). The signed consent form should not be submitted with the manuscript, but should be securely filed in the individual's case notes. Please amend the methods section and ethics statement of the manuscript to explicitly state that the patient/participant has provided consent for publication: “The individual in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish these case details”. If you are unable to obtain consent from the subject of the photograph, you will need to remove the figure and any other textual identifying information or case descriptions for this individual. Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: I Don't Know Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: 1. In line 126-127, the goal of this work is stated. My question is that as stated above, if the key features are essential to face recognition, why do we need to restore images of a person years later anyway. Is it possible to extract the key features from the old photographs for finding the target person? 2. When an acronym or abbreviation is used for the first time in a text, its full form should be written out, followed by the acronym or abbreviation in parentheses, e.g. AT-GAN. 3. This manuscript uses a 128-dimensional feature for recognition, as stated in line 298. Does it work for the senario that there are a large amount of individuals to compare, for example, finding missing children? 4. In Chapter 4, TT model, AgingGer and Kualian are compared with the method proposed in this manuscript. It is suggested that new models should also be compared, such as FaceFusion's age_modifier model. 5. The effect of the self-attention mechanism is not obvious from Fig 16 or section 4.5. More experiments and analyses are suggested. 6. The manuscript contains some grammatical errors and awkward phrasings that impede the readability and comprehension of the content. For instance, line 74 and line 92. I recommend that the manuscript be thoroughly proofread by a native English speaker or a professional editor with expertise in academic writing. Reviewer #2: his paper proposes a cross-age face prediction scheme based on GANs to predict the facial portrait of a person at later point of time. The paper is interesting, however, following are some comments to improve the overall paper before possible publication: 1- The comparison with state-of-the-art papers in the current version is missing. I would suggest to make performance comparison with the latest cutting-edge techniques to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. 2- the related work section should emphasize the current/previous work on the cross-age facial recognition and should also introduce the GAN framework in the similar context. 3- the proposed methodology should be revised/improved to better understand the novel contributions and role of each module in the proposed scheme, e.g. explanation of the attention mechanism should be coherent with the evaluation results. 4- The authors should revise the evaluation section, incorporate more evaluation metrics to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method with the current state-of-the-art techniques, and should use the tables for tabulating the corresponding performance of each model. 5- the writing part is overall poor, need major revision, the authors are suggested to revise and improve the professional language of the paper, and proof-read the paper for any grammatical and spelling mistakes. ******** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy . Reviewer #1: Yes: Long Chen Reviewer #2: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322280.r002
Revision 1
27 Feb 2025 Author Response Dear Editors and Reviewers, Thank you for considering our manuscript titled “A Research on Cross-Age Facial Recognition Technology Based on AT-GAN” (Manuscript Number: PONE-D-24-57436) for publication in PLOS ONE. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort taken by the editors and reviewers to provide constructive feedback, which has helped us improve the quality of our work. We have carefully addressed all the comments and suggestions raised by the reviewers, and we provide our point-by-point responses below. We hope that the revisions made to the manuscript meet the expectations of the reviewers and the editorial team. If further revisions or clarifications are needed, please do not hesitate to let us know. Response to Academic editor: 1. Comment: The novel contributions of the paper can be more better highlighted and explained in a systematic way. Response: We agree that the novel contributions of the paper should be more clearly emphasized. In response to your suggestion, we have revised the Introduction section to systematically highlight the key innovations and significance of our work. Specifically: We have added a paragraph in the Introduction to clearly state the research gap and how our study addresses it. 2. Comment: Language editing/proof-reading may help to improve the readability and overall quality of the paper. Response: In response to your comment, we have taken the following steps: (1) Language Editing: We have engaged a native English speaker to refine the language and ensure clarity throughout the manuscript. The revised version has been thoroughly checked for grammar, syntax, and style. (2) Proof-reading: We have carefully proofread the entire manuscript to eliminate any remaining errors and improve the flow of the text. 3. Comment: The methodology and experimental section need major revision. Response: As per your suggestion, we have carefully revised the Methodology and Experimental sections to address the concerns raised. Specifically, we have: (1) Revised the Methodology section to provide a more detailed and clear description of the methods used, ensuring reproducibility and transparency. (2) Expanded the Experimental section by adding new experiments and analyses to strengthen the validity of our findings. (3) Included a comparative analysis with the current state-of-the-art LFS model to highlight the performance and advantages of our proposed approach. Response to Reviewer #1: 1. Comment: In line 126-127, the goal of this work is stated. My question is that as stated above, if the key features are essential to face recognition, why do we need to restore images of a person years later anyway. Is it possible to extract the key features from the old photographs for finding the target person? Response: Yes, we can extract key features from old photographs to identify the target individual. As introduced in our paper, we first restore the old photographs of the target individual, then extract the key features, and finally generate the appearance of the target individual years later. This application scenario arises when the family members of the target individual only have photos from their childhood or youth, such as in the case of missing children. Our technology is then utilized to generate the target individual's appearance years later, thereby assisting in the search for the target individual. 2. Comment: When an acronym or abbreviation is used for the first time in a text, its full form should be written out, followed by the acronym or abbreviation in parentheses, e.g. AT-GAN. Response: We have carefully revised the manuscript to ensure that all acronyms and abbreviations are properly introduced upon their first use. Changes made: All modifications in the manuscript have been highlighted in yellow for easy reference. 3. Comment: This manuscript uses a 128-dimensional feature for recognition, as stated in line 298. Does it work for the senario that there are a large amount of individuals to compare, for example, finding missing children? Response: In our experiments, the 128-dimensional feature has shown robust performance in handling experimental datasets, as it effectively balances discriminative power and computational efficiency. However, we acknowledge that in extremely large-scale scenarios (e.g., finding missing children), additional optimizations, such as hierarchical filtering or distributed computing, might be necessary to further enhance efficiency. 4. Comment: In Chapter 4, TT model, AgingGer and Kualian are compared with the method proposed in this manuscript. It is suggested that new models should also be compared, such as FaceFusion's age_modifier model. Response: We appreciate your suggestion to consider FaceFusion's age_modifier model as an additional benchmark in our study. We will include a comparison with FaceFusion's age_modifier model in our subsequent research. This will help to further validate the performance of our proposed method against state-of-the-art techniques. We believe this addition will provide a more comprehensive evaluation. 5. Comment: The effect of the self-attention mechanism is not obvious from Fig 16 or section 4.5. More experiments and analyses are suggested. Response: In response to your comment regarding the effect of the self-attention mechanism (Figure 16 and Section 4.5), we have made significant revisions to the manuscript. Specifically, we have: (1) Added a new subsection, “4.6 Validation and Analysis of the Self-Attention Mechanism,” to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the self-attention mechanism’s impact. (2) Conducted additional experiments comparing our proposed method with the LFS model, demonstrating the superior performance of our approach. (3) Included qualitative and quantitative analyses to highlight the effectiveness of the self-attention mechanism, supported by comparisons. 6. Comment: The manuscript contains some grammatical errors and awkward phrasings that impede the readability and comprehension of the content. For instance, line 74 and line 92. I recommend that the manuscript be thoroughly proofread by a native English speaker or a professional editor with expertise in academic writing. Response: We have taken the following steps: (1) Thorough Proofreading: We have carefully reviewed the entire manuscript, paying special attention to the issues highlighted in lines 74 and 92 (the revisions have been highlighted in yellow), as well as other potential areas with similar problems. (2) Professional Editing: As you suggested, we have engaged a native English speaker to thoroughly proofread and polish the manuscript. (3) Language Clarity: We have ensured that all sentences are clear, concise, and grammatically correct, improving the overall flow and readability of the text. Response to Reviewer #2: 1. Comment: The comparison with state-of-the-art papers in the current version is missing. I would suggest to make performance comparison with the latest cutting-edge techniques to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. Response: We have carefully addressed your suggestion regarding the comparison with state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, we have: (1) Conducted a comprehensive performance comparison with the latest cutting-edge techniques, including the LFS model, which is currently one of the most advanced methods in the field. (2) Demonstrated the superiority of our proposed method through detailed experimental results, showing that our approach outperforms the LFS model in key metrics. (3) Included the comparison results in the revised manuscript, presented in tabular formats for clarity and ease of understanding. 2. Comment: The related work section should emphasize the current/previous work on the cross-age facial recognition and should also introduce the GAN framework in the similar context. Response: We have revised the Section 2.1 to provide a more focused discussion on current and previous work in cross-age facial recognition in. Additionally, we have included a detailed introduction to the GAN framework in this context, highlighting its applications and relevance to our work. These changes can be found in Section 2.2 of the revised manuscript. 3. Comment: The proposed methodology should be revised/improved to better understand the novel contributions and role of each module in the proposed scheme, e.g. explanation of the attention mechanism should be coherent with the evaluation results. Response: We have carefully revised the proposed methodology to better clarify the novel contributions and the role of each module in our scheme, as per your suggestion. Specifically, we have: (1) Improved the explanation of the attention mechanism to ensure it is coherent with the evaluation results. We have added a detailed discussion on how the attention mechanism contributes to the overall performance of the proposed method. (2) Highlighted the role of each module in the proposed scheme, emphasizing their individual and collective impact on the results. (3) Strengthened the connection between the methodology and the evaluation by providing a more thorough analysis of how the attention mechanism and other modules are validated through the experimental results. 4. Comment: The authors should revise the evaluation section, incorporate more evaluation metrics to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method with the current state-of-the-art techniques, and should use the tables for tabulating the corresponding performance of each model. Response: We have carefully revised the Result section according to your comments. Specifically, we have: (1) Incorporated additional evaluation metrics to comprehensively demonstrate the performance of our proposed method. (2) Conducted a detailed comparison with the current state-of-the-art techniques, including the LFS model, to highlight the advantages of our approach. (3) Organized the results in tabular form to clearly present the performance of each model, making it easier for readers to compare and analyze the results. 5. Comment: The writing part is overall poor, need major revision, the authors are suggested to revise and improve the professional language of the paper, and proof-read the paper for any grammatical and spelling mistakes. Response: We sincerely apologize for the language issues in the manuscript. To address this, we have thoroughly revised the entire paper to improve the clarity, coherence, and professionalism of the writing. Additionally, we have engaged a native English speaker to proofread the manuscript and correct any grammatical or spelling errors. We believe these changes have significantly improved the overall quality of the manuscript. Additional Revisions: In addition to the changes made in response to the Academic editor and reviewers’ comments, we have also made the following improvements to the manuscript: (1) We have thoroughly revised the manuscript according to the templates to ensure it complies with PLOS ONE's formatting requirements, including file naming conventions. (2) We have uploaded the code to GitHub following best practices and ensured that it will be freely accessible upon publication. The code repository link is: https://github.com/xingyuangfy/CAF_AT_GAN. We will ensure the reproducibility and reusability of the code. (3) We have uploaded the relevant data. All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting information files. (4) We have ensured that the corresponding author's ORCID ID is validated in Editorial Manager. (5) We have amended the abstract on the online submission form to ensure it is identical to the abstract in the manuscript. (6) We have added the ethics statement and the following statement to the methods section in the manuscript: “The individual in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish these case details.” We believe that the revised manuscript has been significantly improved and now meets the high standards of PLOS ONE. Thank you again for your time and valuable feedback. We look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Xingyuan Peng Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.doc https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322280.r003
14 Mar 2025 Decision Letter - Zeeshan Ahmad, Editor PONE-D-24-57436R1A Research on Cross-Age Facial Recognition Technology Based on AT-GANPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Peng, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. ============================== ACADEMIC EDITOR: The Introduction Section lacks the logical flow and synchronization, the contents need to be revised and improved. The Introduction section should briefly introduce the research area, importance, research gap, problem definition, and solution. There are still several grammatical/spelling mistakes exist in the manuscript. Also improve the language of the paper by thoroughly proof-reading the paper The mathematical equation/symbols should be written in mathtype or some equation editor and can be more carefully formatted, (see which symbols to italic, capital, small i.e., vectors, scalars, variables, matric etc) ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 28 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols . We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Zeeshan Ahmad Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy . Reviewer #2: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322280.r004
Revision 2
18 Mar 2025 Author Response �1�In accordance with PLOS ONE's policy on human subjects research, we have obtained written informed consent from the individual(s) for publication of these details under the terms of the PLOS open-access (CC-BY) license. The signed consent form has been securely filed in the individual's case notes as required. �2�Additionally, we have amended the Methods section of the manuscript to explicitly state that the patient/participant has provided consent for publication. The revised statement reads: “The individual in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in the PLOS consent form) to publish these case details.” https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322280.r005
19 Mar 2025 Decision Letter - Zeeshan Ahmad, Editor A Research on Cross-Age Facial Recognition Technology Based on AT-GAN PONE-D-24-57436R2 Dear Dr. Peng, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Zeeshan Ahmad Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322280.r006
Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Zeeshan Ahmad, Editor PONE-D-24-57436R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Peng, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Zeeshan Ahmad Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0322280.r007

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .