Towards computational models of kinship verification

We tackle the challenge of kinship verification using novel feature extraction and selection methods, automatically classifying pairs of face images as “related” or “unrelated” (in terms of kinship). First, we conducted a controlled online search to collect frontal face images of 150 pairs of public figures and celebrities, along with images of their parents or children. Next, we propose and evaluate a set of low-level image features for this classification problem. After selecting the most discriminative inherited facial features, we demonstrate a classification accuracy of 70.67% on a test set of image pairs using K-Nearest-Neighbors. Finally, we present an evaluation of human performance on this problem.