Kinship classification by modeling facial feature heredity

• Published in: 2013 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing pp. 2983 - 2987
• Main Authors: Ruogu Fang, Gallagher, Andrew C., Tsuhan Chen, Loui, Alexander
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.09.2013
• Subjects: facial inheritance; family; kinship classification; sparse group lasso; sparsity
• ISSN: 1522-4880; 2381-8549
• DOI: 10.1109/ICIP.2013.6738614

We propose a new, challenging, problem in kinship classification: recognizing the family that a query person belongs to from a set of families. We propose a novel framework for recognizing kinship by modeling this problem as that of reconstructing the query face from a mixture of parts from a set of families. To accomplish this, we reconstruct the query face from a sparse set of samples among the candidate families. Our sparse group reconstruction roughly models the biological process of inheritance: a child inherits genetic material from two parents, and therefore may not appear completely similar to either parent, but is instead a composite of the parents. The family classification is determined based on the reconstruction error for each family. On our newly collected "Family101" dataset, we discover links between familial traits among family members and achieve state-of-the-art family classification performance.