Challenge report: Recognizing Families In the Wild Data Challenge

This paper is a brief report to our submission to the Recognizing Families In the Wild Data Challenge (4th Edition), in conjunction with FG 2020 Forum. Automatic kinship recognition has attracted many researchers' attention for its full application, but it is still a very challenging task because of the limited information that can be used to determine whether a pair of faces are blood relatives or not. In this paper, we studied previous methods and proposed our method. We try many methods, like deep metric learning-based, to extract deep embedding feature for every image, then determine if they are blood relatives by Euclidean distance or method based on classes. Finally, we find some tricks like sampling more negative samples and high resolution that can help get better performance. Moreover, we proposed a symmetric network with a binary classification based method to get our best score in all tasks.Comment: RFIW,IEEE FG202

SelfKin: Self Adjusted Deep Model For Kinship Verification

One of the unsolved challenges in the field of biometrics and face recognition is Kinship Verification. This problem aims to understand if two people are family-related and how (sisters, brothers, etc.) Solving this problem can give rise to varied tasks and applications. In the area of homeland security (HLS) it is crucial to auto-detect if the person questioned is related to a wanted suspect, In the field of biometrics, kinship-verification can help to discriminate between families by photos and in the field of predicting or fashion it can help to predict an older or younger model of people faces. Lately, and with the advanced deep learning technology, this problem has gained focus from the research community in matters of data and research. In this article, we propose using a Deep Learning approach for solving the Kinship-Verification problem. Further, we offer a novel self-learning deep model, which learns the essential features from different faces. We show that our model wins the Recognize Families In the Wild(RFIW2018,FG2018) challenge and obtains state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we show that our proposed model can reduce the size of the network by half without loss in performance

A Multi-Task Comparator Framework for Kinship Verification

Approaches for kinship verification often rely on cosine distances between face identification features. However, due to gender bias inherent in these features, it is hard to reliably predict whether two opposite-gender pairs are related. Instead of fine tuning the feature extractor network on kinship verification, we propose a comparator network to cope with this bias. After concatenating both features, cascaded local expert networks extract the information most relevant for their corresponding kinship relation. We demonstrate that our framework is robust against this gender bias and achieves comparable results on two tracks of the RFIW Challenge 2020. Moreover, we show how our framework can be further extended to handle partially known or unknown kinship relations.Comment: To be published in IEEE FG 2020 - RFIW Worksho

Achieving Better Kinship Recognition Through Better Baseline

Recognizing blood relations using face images can be seen as an application of face recognition systems with additional restrictions. These restrictions proved to be difficult to deal with, however, recent advancements in face verification show that there is still much to gain using more data and novel ideas. As a result face recognition is a great source domain from which we can transfer the knowledge to get better performance in kinship recognition as a source domain. We present a new baseline for an automatic kinship recognition task and relatives search based on RetinaFace[1] for face registration and ArcFace[2] face verification model. With the approach described above as the foundation, we constructed a pipeline that achieved state-of-the-art performance on two tracks in the recent Recognizing Families In the Wild Data Challenge.Comment: Accepted for the 4th Recognizing Families In the Wild Worksho

Recognizing Families In the Wild: White Paper for the 4th Edition Data Challenge

Recognizing Families In the Wild (RFIW): an annual large-scale, multi-track automatic kinship recognition evaluation that supports various visual kin-based problems on scales much higher than ever before. Organized in conjunction with the 15th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) as a Challenge, RFIW provides a platform for publishing original work and the gathering of experts for a discussion of the next steps. This paper summarizes the supported tasks (i.e., kinship verification, tri-subject verification, and search & retrieval of missing children) in the evaluation protocols, which include the practical motivation, technical background, data splits, metrics, and benchmark results. Furthermore, top submissions (i.e., leader-board stats) are listed and reviewed as a high-level analysis on the state of the problem. In the end, the purpose of this paper is to describe the 2020 RFIW challenge, end-to-end, along with forecasts in promising future directions.Comment: White Paper for challenge in conjunction with 15th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2020

Deep Fusion Siamese Network for Automatic Kinship Verification

Automatic kinship verification aims to determine whether some individuals belong to the same family. It is of great research significance to help missing persons reunite with their families. In this work, the challenging problem is progressively addressed in two respects. First, we propose a deep siamese network to quantify the relative similarity between two individuals. When given two input face images, the deep siamese network extracts the features from them and fuses these features by combining and concatenating. Then, the fused features are fed into a fully-connected network to obtain the similarity score between two faces, which is used to verify the kinship. To improve the performance, a jury system is also employed for multi-model fusion. Second, two deep siamese networks are integrated into a deep triplet network for tri-subject (i.e., father, mother and child) kinship verification, which is intended to decide whether a child is related to a pair of parents or not. Specifically, the obtained similarity scores of father-child and mother-child are weighted to generate the parent-child similarity score for kinship verification. Recognizing Families In the Wild (RFIW) is a challenging kinship recognition task with multiple tracks, which is based on Families in the Wild (FIW), a large-scale and comprehensive image database for automatic kinship recognition. The Kinship Verification (track I) and Tri-Subject Verification (track II) are supported during the ongoing RFIW2020 Challenge. Our team (ustc-nelslip) ranked 1st in track II, and 3rd in track I. The code is available at https://github.com/gniknoil/FG2020-kinship.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Supervised Mixed Norm Autoencoder for Kinship Verification in Unconstrained Videos

Identifying kinship relations has garnered interest due to several applications such as organizing and tagging the enormous amount of videos being uploaded on the Internet. Existing research in kinship verification primarily focuses on kinship prediction with image pairs. In this research, we propose a new deep learning framework for kinship verification in unconstrained videos using a novel Supervised Mixed Norm regularization Autoencoder (SMNAE). This new autoencoder formulation introduces class-specific sparsity in the weight matrix. The proposed three-stage SMNAE based kinship verification framework utilizes the learned spatio-temporal representation in the video frames for verifying kinship in a pair of videos. A new kinship video (KIVI) database of more than 500 individuals with variations due to illumination, pose, occlusion, ethnicity, and expression is collected for this research. It comprises a total of 355 true kin video pairs with over 250,000 still frames. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated on the KIVI database and six existing kinship databases. On the KIVI database, SMNAE yields video-based kinship verification accuracy of 83.18% which is at least 3.2% better than existing algorithms. The algorithm is also evaluated on six publicly available kinship databases and compared with best-reported results. It is observed that the proposed SMNAE consistently yields best results on all the databasesComment: Accepted for publication in Transactions in Image Processin

Face Recognition: Too Bias, or Not Too Bias?

We reveal critical insights into problems of bias in state-of-the-art facial recognition (FR) systems using a novel Balanced Faces In the Wild (BFW) dataset: data balanced for gender and ethnic groups. We show variations in the optimal scoring threshold for face-pairs across different subgroups. Thus, the conventional approach of learning a global threshold for all pairs resulting in performance gaps among subgroups. By learning subgroup-specific thresholds, we not only mitigate problems in performance gaps but also show a notable boost in the overall performance. Furthermore, we do a human evaluation to measure the bias in humans, which supports the hypothesis that such a bias exists in human perception. For the BFW database, source code, and more, visit github.com/visionjo/facerec-bias-bfw.Comment: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 202

A Unified Approach to Kinship Verification

In this work, we propose a deep learning-based approach for kin verification using a unified multi-task learning scheme where all kinship classes are jointly learned. This allows us to better utilize small training sets that are typical of kin verification. We introduce a novel approach for fusing the embeddings of kin images, to avoid overfitting, which is a common issue in training such networks. An adaptive sampling scheme is derived for the training set images to resolve the inherent imbalance in kin verification datasets. A thorough ablation study exemplifies the effectivity of our approach, which is experimentally shown to outperform contemporary state-of-the-art kin verification results when applied to the Families In the Wild, FG2018, and FG2020 datasets

Investigating Bias in Deep Face Analysis: The KANFace Dataset and Empirical Study

Deep learning-based methods have pushed the limits of the state-of-the-art in face analysis. However, despite their success, these models have raised concerns regarding their bias towards certain demographics. This bias is inflicted both by limited diversity across demographics in the training set, as well as the design of the algorithms. In this work, we investigate the demographic bias of deep learning models in face recognition, age estimation, gender recognition and kinship verification. To this end, we introduce the most comprehensive, large-scale dataset of facial images and videos to date. It consists of 40K still images and 44K sequences (14.5M video frames in total) captured in unconstrained, real-world conditions from 1,045 subjects. The data are manually annotated in terms of identity, exact age, gender and kinship. The performance of state-of-the-art models is scrutinized and demographic bias is exposed by conducting a series of experiments. Lastly, a method to debias network embeddings is introduced and tested on the proposed benchmarks