Hierarchical Representation Learning for Kinship Verification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical deep learning framework using filtered contractive deep belief networks for kinship verification, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and improving face verification performance by over 20%.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel fcDBN feature representation and a hierarchical framework for kinship verification, along with a new WVU Kinship Database and methods to enhance face verification using kinship cues.

Findings

State-of-the-art kinship verification accuracy on WVU Kinship and benchmark datasets.

Over 20% improvement in face verification performance using kinship information.

Effective hierarchical representation learning for kinship cues.

Abstract

Kinship verification has a number of applications such as organizing large collections of images and recognizing resemblances among humans. In this research, first, a human study is conducted to understand the capabilities of human mind and to identify the discriminatory areas of a face that facilitate kinship-cues. Utilizing the information obtained from the human study, a hierarchical Kinship Verification via Representation Learning (KVRL) framework is utilized to learn the representation of different face regions in an unsupervised manner. We propose a novel approach for feature representation termed as filtered contractive deep belief networks (fcDBN). The proposed feature representation encodes relational information present in images using filters and contractive regularization penalty. A compact representation of facial images of kin is extracted as an output from the learned model and a multi-layer neural network is utilized to verify the kin accurately. A new WVU Kinship Database is created which consists of multiple images per subject to facilitate kinship verification. The results show that the proposed deep learning framework (KVRL-fcDBN) yields stateof-the-art kinship verification accuracy on the WVU Kinship database and on four existing benchmark datasets. Further, kinship information is used as a soft biometric modality to boost the performance of face verification via product of likelihood ratio and support vector machine based approaches. Using the proposed KVRL-fcDBN framework, an improvement of over 20% is observed in the performance of face verification.