Visual Kinship Recognition of Families in the Wild

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2018 Nov;40(11):2624-2637. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2018.2826549. Epub 2018 Apr 13.

Abstract

We present the largest database for visual kinship recognition, Families In the Wild (FIW), with over 13,000 family photos of 1,000 family trees with 4-to-38 members. It took only a small team to build FIW with efficient labeling tools and work-flow. To extend FIW, we further improved upon this process with a novel semi-automatic labeling scheme that used annotated faces and unlabeled text metadata to discover labels, which were then used, along with existing FIW data, for the proposed clustering algorithm that generated label proposals for all newly added data-both processes are shared and compared in depth, showing great savings in time and human input required. Essentially, the clustering algorithm proposed is semi-supervised and uses labeled data to produce more accurate clusters. We statistically compare FIW to related datasets, which unarguably shows enormous gains in overall size and amount of information encapsulated in the labels. We benchmark two tasks, kinship verification and family classification, at scales incomparably larger than ever before. Pre-trained CNN models fine-tuned on FIW outscores other conventional methods and achieved state-of-the art on the renowned KinWild datasets. We also measure human performance on kinship recognition and compare to a fine-tuned CNN.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Databases, Factual
  • Deep Learning
  • Face / anatomy & histology*
  • Family Characteristics
  • Family Relations
  • Family*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Photography
  • Supervised Machine Learning*