Computational Models of Kinship Verification

Abstract

Face recognition is an active research area in the computer vision community. Classical algorithms like Eigenface and Fisherface are known to provide a robust framework for face recognition, while some recent works address the illumination and orientation invariant recognition. However the recognition of people bonded by kinship using facial images is a marginally explored research field. This has led to computational models of kinship verification.
In this work, we present a computational model for kinship verification using novel feature extraction and selection methods, automatically classifying pairs of face images as "related" or "unrelated" (in terms of kinship). First, we conducted a controlled online search to collect frontal face images of 150 pairs of public figures and celebrities, along with images of their parents or children. Next, we propose and evaluate a set of low-level image features for this classification problem. After selecting the most discriminative inherited facial features, we demonstrate a classification accuracy of 70.67% on a test set of image pairs using K-Nearest-Neighbors. Finally, we present an evaluation of human performance on this problem.

Downloads

Kinship Verification Dataset

Slides

Poster

Press

NewScientist, 2011

BibTeX

@inproceedings{fang2010towards,
  title={Towards computational models of kinship verification},
  author={Fang, Ruogu and Tang, Kevin D and Snavely, Noah and Chen, Tsuhan},
  booktitle={Image Processing (ICIP), 2010 17th IEEE International Conference on},
  pages={1577--1580},
  year={2010},
  organization={IEEE}
}

@inproceedings{fang2013kinship,
  title={Kinship Classification by Modeling Facial Feature Heredity},
  author={Fang, Ruogu and Andrew C. Gallagher and Alexander Loiu and Chen, Tsuhan},
  booktitle={Image Processing (ICIP), 2013 20th IEEE International Conference on},
  year={2013},
  organization={IEEE}
}

Publications on Kinship Recognition

Ruogu Fang, Kevin D. Tang, Noah Snavely, Tsuhan Chen: Towards Computational Models of Kinship Verification. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Hong Kong, September 2010. Best Paper Award

Ruogu Fang, Andrew C. Gallagher, Tsuhan Chen, Alexander Loiu. Kinship Classification by Modeling Facial Feature Heredity. The 20th International Conference on Image Processing, 2013.

Demo

Ruogu Fang, Kevin D. Tang, Noah Snavely, Tsuhan Chen. Kin Recognition for Family Photo Album Organization and Live Demonstration. European Conference on Computer Vision, Crete, Greece, September 2010. (ECCV)

Ruogu Fang, Sherman Ng, Jane Tsai, Johnny Lai, Noah Snavely, Tsuhan Chen: Family Relationship Classification in Photos. IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2011. (CVPR) [Video]

Computational Models of Kinship Verification ICIP 2010 Best Paper Award