A Race Bias Free Face Aging Model for Reliable Kinship Verification

Abstract

The age gap in kinship verification addresses the time difference between the photos of the parent and the child. Moreover, their same-age photos are often unavailable, and face aging models are racially biased, which impacts the likeness of photos. Therefore, we propose a face aging GAN model, RA-GAN, consisting of two new modules, RACEpSp and a feature mixer, to produce racially unbiased images. The unbiased synthesized photos are used in kinship verification to investigate the results of verifying same-age parent-child images. The experiments demonstrate that our RA-GAN outperforms SAM-GAN on an average of 13.14\% across all age groups, and CUSP-GAN in the 60+ age group by 9.1\% in terms of racial accuracy. Moreover, RA-GAN can preserve subjects' identities better than SAM-GAN and CUSP-GAN across all age groups. Additionally, we demonstrate that transforming parent and child images from the KinFaceW-I and KinFaceW-II datasets to the same age can enhance the verification accuracy across all age groups. The accuracy increases with our RA-GAN for the kinship relationships of father-son and father-daughter, mother-son, and mother-daughter, which are 5.22, 5.12, 1.63, and 0.41, respectively, on KinFaceW-I. Additionally, the accuracy for the relationships of father-daughter, father-son, and mother-son is 2.9, 0.39, and 1.6 on KinFaceW-II, respectively. The code is available at~\href{https://github.com/bardiya2254kariminia/An-Age-Transformation-whitout-racial-bias-for-Kinship-verification}{Github}