Neighborhood repulsed metric learning for kinship verification

Abstract

Kinship verification from facial images is a challenging problem in computer vision, and there is a very few attempts on tackling this problem in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new neighborhood repulsed metric learning (NRML) method for kinship verification. Motivated by the fact that interclass samples (without kinship relations) with higher similarity usually lie in a neighborhood and are more easily misclassified than those with lower similarity, we aim to learn a distance metric under which the intraclass samples (with kinship relations) are pushed as close as possible and interclass samples lying in a neighborhood are repulsed and pulled as far as possible, simultaneously, such that more discriminative information can be exploited for verification. Moreover, we propose a multiview NRM-L (MNRML) method to seek a common distance metric to make better use of multiple feature descriptors to further improve the verification performance. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods.