Northeastern SMILE Lab - Recognizing Faces in the Wild

Can you determine if two individuals are related?

This notebook contains my implementation of a challenge hosted by Kaggle. The data can be obtained from the link.

From the official description:

Do you have your father’s nose?

Blood relatives often share facial features. Now researchers at Northeastern University want to improve their algorithm for facial image classification to bridge the gap between research and other familial markers like DNA results. That will be your challenge in this new Kaggle competition.

An automatic kinship classifier has been in the works at Northeastern since 2010. Yet this technology remains largely unseen in practice for a couple of reasons:

1. Existing image databases for kinship recognition tasks aren’t large enough to capture and reflect the true data distributions of the families of the world.

2. Many hidden factors affect familial facial relationships, so a more discriminant model is needed than the computer vision algorithms used most often for higher-level categorizations (e.g. facial recognition or object classification).

In this competition, you’ll help researchers build a more complex model by determining if two people are blood-related based solely on images of their faces. If you think you can get it “on the nose,” this competition is for you.