A Dataset for Kinship Estimation from Image of Hand Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Kinship (Familial relationships) detection is crucial in many fields and has applications in biometric security, adoption, forensic investigations, and more. It is also essential during wars and natural disasters like earthquakes since it may aid in reunion, missing person searches, establishing emergency contacts, and providing psychological support. The most common method of determining kinship is DNA analysis which is highly accurate. Another approach, which is noninvasive, uses facial photos with computer vision and machine learning algorithms for kinship estimation. Each part of the Human -body has its own embedded information that can be extracted and adopted for identification, verification, or classification of that person. Kinship recognition is based on finding traits that are shared by every family. We investigate the use of hand geometry for kinship detection, which is a new approach. Because of the available hand image Datasets do not contain kinship ground truth; therefore, we created our own dataset. This paper describes the tools, methodology, and details of the collected MKH, which stands for the Mosul Kinship Hand, images dataset. The images of MKH dataset were collected using a mobile phone camera with a suitable setup and consisted of 648 images for 81 individuals from 14 families (8 hand situations per person). This paper also presents the use of this dataset in kinship prediction using machine learning. Google MdiaPipe was used for hand detection, segmentation, and geometrical key points finding. Handcraft feature extraction was used to extract 43 distinctive geometrical features from each image. A neural network classifier was designed and trained to predict kinship, yielding about 93% prediction accuracy. The results of this novel approach demonstrated that the hand possesses biometric characteristics that may be used to establish kinship, and that the suggested method is a promising way as a kinship indicator.