Gender-independent kinship verification network via fuzzy disentangling and multi-metric inference

Kinship verification aims to determine whether two individuals share a familial relationship based on facial information. Cross-gender relationships (i.e., Father-Daughter and Mother-Son) continue to face formidable challenges due to the diversity and uncertainty of genetic inheritance. Existing studies primarily focus on extracting robust features and measuring similarity, with limited attention given to the fuzziness of gender differences. To address this issue, this paper proposes a kinship verification framework based on a fuzzy neural network, which adaptively extracts gender-independent kinship features and handles relationship fuzziness to improve cross-gender verification performance. Specifically, the Swin Transformer, which has demonstrated excellent performance in facial analysis, is employed to extract initial features. A fuzzy neural network is then designed to disentangle gender and kinship features, with a gender recognition task introduced to further enhance this disentanglement and improve the gender independence of kinship features. Subsequently, a multi-metric fuzzy reasoning module is adopted to integrate kinship features, extract latent kinship cues, and leverage a contrastive loss function to effectively mine potential negative sample information, thereby significantly enhancing the model's robustness. Experimental results on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.