Audio-visual kinship verification in the wild

Abstract Kinship verification is a challenging problem, where recognition systems are trained to establish a kin relation between two individuals based on facial images or videos. However, due to variations in capture conditions (background, pose, expression, illumination and occlusion), state-of-the-art systems currently provide a low level of accuracy. As in many visual recognition and affective computing applications, kinship verification may benefit from a combination of discriminant information extracted from both video and audio signals. In this paper, we investigate for the first time the fusion audio-visual information from both face and voice modalities to improve kinship verification accuracy. First, we propose a new multi-modal kinship dataset called TALking KINship (TALKIN), that is comprised of several pairs of video sequences with subjects talking. State-of-the-art conventional and deep learning models are assessed and compared for kinship verification using this dataset. Finally, we propose a deep Siamese network for multi-modal fusion of kinship relations. Experiments with the TALKIN dataset indicate that the proposed Siamese network provides a significantly higher level of accuracy over baseline uni-modal and multi-modal fusion techniques for kinship verification. Results also indicate that audio (vocal) information is complementary and useful for kinship verification problem