A pyramid multi-level face descriptor: application to kinship verification

TLDR: Experiments conducted on three public kinship databases show that the proposed descriptor can outperform many state-of-the-art kinship verification algorithms and descriptors including those that are based on deep Convolutional Neural Nets.

Abstract: Texture descriptors such as Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Phase Quantization (LPQ), and Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) have been widely used for face image analysis. This work introduces a novel framework for image-based kinship verification able to efficiently combine local and global facial information extracted from diverse descriptors. The proposed scheme relies on two main points: (1) we model the face images using a Pyramid Multi-level (PML) representation where local descriptors are extracted from several blocks at different resolution scales; (2) we compute the covariance (second-order statistics) between diverse local features characterizing each individual block in the PML representation. This gives rise to a face descriptor with two interesting properties: (i) thanks to the PML representation, scales and face parts are explicitly encoded in the final descriptor without having to detect the facial landmarks; (ii) the covariance descriptor encodes spatial features of any type allowing the integration of several state-of-the-art texture and color features. Experiments conducted on three public kinship databases show that the proposed descriptor can outperform many state-of-the-art kinship verification algorithms and descriptors including those that are based on deep Convolutional Neural Nets.