Kinship verification using facial images by robust similarity learning

Abstract

Kinship verification from face images is a new and challenging problem in pattern recognition and computer vision, and it has many potential real-world applications including social media analysis and children adoptions. Most existing methods for kinship verification assume that each positive pair of face images (with kin relationship) has greater similarity score than those of negative pairs without kin relationships under a distance metric to be learned. In practice, however, this assumption is usually too strict for real-life kin samples. Instead, we propose in this paper learning a robust similarity model, under which the similarity score of each positive pair is greater than average similarity score of some negative ones. In addition, we develop an online similarity learning algorithm for more scalable application. We empirically evaluate the proposed methods on benchmark datasets, and experimental results show that our method outperforms some state-of-the-art kinship verification methods in terms of verification accuracy and computational efficiency.