Kinship verification from facial images and videos: human versus machine

Abstract

Automatic kinship verification from facial images is a relatively new and challenging research problem in computer vision. It consists in automatically determining whether two persons have a biological kin relation by examining their facial attributes. In this work, we compare the performance of humans and machines in kinship verification tasks. We investigate the state-of-the-art methods in automatic kinship verification from facial images, comparing their performance with the one obtained by asking humans to complete an equivalent task using a crowdsourcing system. Our results show that machines can consistently beat humans in kinship classification tasks in both images and videos. In addition, we study the limitations of currently available kinship databases and analyzing their possible impact in kinship verification experiment and this type of comparison.