Kinship Verification from Videos using Spatio-Temporal Texture Features and Deep Learning

Automatic kinship verification using facial images is a relatively new and challenging research problem in computer vision. It consists in automatically predicting whether two persons have a biological kin relation by examining their facial attributes. While most of the existing works extract shallow handcrafted features from still face images, we approach this problem from spatio-temporal point of view and explore the use of both shallow texture features and deep features for characterizing faces. Promising results, especially those of deep features, are obtained on the benchmark UvA-NEMO Smile database. Our extensive experiments also show the superiority of using videos over still images, hence pointing out the important role of facial dynamics in kinship verification. Furthermore, the fusion of the two types of features (i.e. shallow spatio-temporal texture features and deep features) shows significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 7 page

Learning Local Metrics and Influential Regions for Classification

The performance of distance-based classifiers heavily depends on the underlying distance metric, so it is valuable to learn a suitable metric from the data. To address the problem of multimodality, it is desirable to learn local metrics. In this short paper, we define a new intuitive distance with local metrics and influential regions, and subsequently propose a novel local metric learning method for distance-based classification. Our key intuition is to partition the metric space into influential regions and a background region, and then regulate the effectiveness of each local metric to be within the related influential regions. We learn local metrics and influential regions to reduce the empirical hinge loss, and regularize the parameters on the basis of a resultant learning bound. Encouraging experimental results are obtained from various public and popular data sets

Image-based family verification in the wild

Facial image analysis has been an important subject of study in the communities of pat- tern recognition and computer vision. Facial images contain much information about the person they belong to: identity, age, gender, ethnicity, expression and many more. For that reason, the analysis of facial images has many applications in real world problems such as face recognition, age estimation, gender classification or facial expression recognition. Visual kinship recognition is a new research topic in the scope of facial image analysis. It is essential for many real-world applications. However, nowadays there exist only a few practical vision systems capable to handle such tasks. Hence, vision technology for kinship-based problems has not matured enough to be applied to real- world problems. This leads to a concern of unsatisfactory performance when attempted on real-world datasets. Kinship verification is to determine pairwise kin relations for a pair of given images. It can be viewed as a typical binary classification problem, i.e., a face pair is either related by kinship or it is not. Prior research works have addressed kinship types for which pre-existing datasets have provided images, annotations and a verification task protocol. Namely, father-son, father-daughter, mother-son and mother-daughter. The main objective of this Master work is the study and development of feature selection and fusion for the problem of family verification from facial images. To achieve this objective, there is a main tasks that can be addressed: perform a compara- tive study on face descriptors that include classic descriptors as well as deep descriptors. The main contributions of this Thesis work are: 1. Studying the state of the art of the problem of family verification in images. 2. Implementing and comparing several criteria that correspond to different face rep- resentations (Local Binary Patterns (LBP), Histogram Oriented Gradients (HOG), deep descriptors)

KFC: Kinship Verification with Fair Contrastive Loss and Multi-Task Learning

Kinship verification is an emerging task in computer vision with multiple potential applications. However, there's no large enough kinship dataset to train a representative and robust model, which is a limitation for achieving better performance. Moreover, face verification is known to exhibit bias, which has not been dealt with by previous kinship verification works and sometimes even results in serious issues. So we first combine existing kinship datasets and label each identity with the correct race in order to take race information into consideration and provide a larger and complete dataset, called KinRace dataset. Secondly, we propose a multi-task learning model structure with attention module to enhance accuracy, which surpasses state-of-the-art performance. Lastly, our fairness-aware contrastive loss function with adversarial learning greatly mitigates racial bias. We introduce a debias term into traditional contrastive loss and implement gradient reverse in race classification task, which is an innovative idea to mix two fairness methods to alleviate bias. Exhaustive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed KFC in both standard deviation and accuracy at the same time.Comment: Accepted by BMVC 202