Mixed bi-subject kinship verification via multi-view multi-task learning

Particularly our contributions are three folds: first, we introduce a new type of learning problem, called mixed bi-subject kinship verification, to the topic of bi-subject kinship verification: instead of simply verifying whether some fixed kinship relationship (e.g., mother-son) can be established for a given pair of parent-child images, we try to figure out whether any type of the four kinship relations can be established according to the visual features of the image pair, with no need to know the genders of the subjects to be verified beforehand. Second, we propose a novel multi-task learning method to address this problem with two transformation matrices - one is shared amongst all the tasks and the other is unique to each task. Both matrices are simultaneously learned in a joint framework, which enables our algorithm to utilize the common knowledge of the four tasks. Third, we propose a multi-view multi-task learning(MMTL) method to perform multiple feature fusion to improve the mixed bi-subject kinship verification performance. Extensive experiments on the large scale KinFaceW kinship database demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.