Feasibility of Kinship Search in Inverse Family Problem

Abstract

Kinship recognition from facial images is a challenging task that broadens traditional facial verification techniques by incorporating genetic and generational variations. While preexisting approaches, such as those explored in the Recognizing Families In the Wild (RFIW), focus on verifying familial relationships in a standard temporal direction (mostly comparing parents to their younger children), our reaserch addresses the inverse problem: identifying children by comparing adults with younger versions of their parents. This work’s goal is to determine whether this inverse formulation consitutes a different problem from traditional kinship recognition, or whether it can be addressed using the same approaches. To this end, we used ArcFace [Deng et al., 2019] for facial alignment and embedding extraction. We also developed a new dataset reflecting this temporal inversion, based on images extracted from IMDb (Internet Movie Database). We evaluated the model’s performance by comparing the distribution of the cosine similarity in both datasets: the traditional approach (FIW) and our newly proposed inverse dataset.