Transfer metric learning for kinship verification with locality-constrained sparse features

Kinship verification between aged parents and their children based on facial images is a challenging problem, due to aging factor which makes their facial similarities less distinct. In this paper, we propose to perform kinship verification in a transfer learning manner, which introduces photos of parents in their earlier ages as intermediate references to facilitate the verification. Child-young parent pairs are regarded as source domain and child-old parent ones are considered as target domain. The transfer learning scheme contains two phases. In the transfer metric learning phase, the extracted locality-constrained sparse features of images are projected into an optimized subspace where the intra-class distances are minimized and the inter-class ones are maximized. In the transfer classifier learning phase, a cross domain classifier is learned by a transfer SVM algorithm. Experimental results on UB KinFace dataset indicate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.