FIW-Database

FIW is the largest and most comprehensive database available for kinship recognition. FIW is made up of 11,932 natural family photos of 1,000 families– nearly 10x more than the next-to-largest, Family-101 [7] database. Also, we have 656,954 image pairs split between the 11 relationship (see Figure 1), which is much larger than the 2nd to largest Kin-Wild II with 2,000 pairs for only 4 kinship types. For more information see PAMI.

The goal of kinship verification is to determine whether a pair of faces are blood relatives or not. This task has seen lots of attention, which mainly focus on parent-child pair-wise types–father-daughter (F-D), father-son (F-S), mother-daughter (M-D), mother-son (M-S)–though some have also focused on siblings pairs– brother-brother (B-B), sister-sister (S-S). This data supports all prior pair-wise types in sets much larger than previously offered to the research community. Inaddition, we introduce grandparent-grandchild pairs for the first time– grandfather-granddaughter (GF-GD), grandfather-grandson (GF-GS),  grandmother-granddaughter (GM-GD), grandmother-grandson (GM-GS). As stated on the results page, our top performing benchmark scored an average accuracy of about 71%, so not only is there room for improvement, but also a need for more reliable systems before such technology is employed for practical purposes. This large-scale kinship verification challenge is made possible with the recently introduced FIW database. Kinship verification has the potential to improve social media tagging, ancestry/genealogy site suggestions, along with many other applications in technology and media.

Samples of 11 pair types of FIW. Each type is of a unique pair randomly selected from a set of diverse families to show variation in ethnicity, while four faces of each individual depict age variations.

FIW is made-up of 11,932 family photos that span 1,000 different families, with the data distributed fairly: an average of about 12 images per family, each with at least 3 and as many as 38 members. The FIW database is contains rich labels capturing the complex hierarchical relationships inherited throughout families (i.e., family trees).