Kinship Verification from Facial Images Using Feature Descriptors

Abstract

Kinship Verification via facial images is an emerging research topic in the field of biometrics, pattern recognition, and computer vision. It is motivated by the findings that individuals with some genetic relations have certain similarities in their facial appearances. These similarities in the facial appearance is a result of inherited facial features from one generation to next generation, especially from parents to children. The researchers use these inherited facial features to perform Kinship Verification and validate their results. Most of the existing methods in Kinship Verification are based on metric learning which aims to improve the verification rate ignoring the effect of salient facial features. This paper aims to learn the effect of extracted facial features between pair of facial images to perform Kinship Verification. This paper proposes different feature descriptors to describe salient facial features and support vector machine classifier to learn these extracted facial features. To validate the accuracy of the proposed methods, experiments are performed on KinFaceW-I dataset. The results obtained outperformed previous results and would encourage researchers to focus on this emerging topic.