Seeing people in social context: Recognizing people and social relationships

The people in an image are generally not strangers, but instead often share social relationships such as husband-wife, siblings, grandparent-child, father-child, or mother-child. Further, the social relationship between a pair of people influences the relative position and appearance of the people in the image. This paper explores using familial social relationships as context for recognizing people and for recognizing the social relationships between pairs of people. We introduce a model for representing the interaction between social relationship, facial appearance, and identity. We show that the family relationship a pair of people share influences the relative pairwise features between them. The experiments on a set of personal collections show significant improvement in people recognition is achieved by modeling social relationships, even in a weak label setting that is attractive in practical applications. Furthermore, we show the social relationships are effectively recognized in images from a separate test image collection.