Abstract: Face-based kinship verification is a challenging and new problem in recent years, which aims
to automatically predict whether two persons have a biological kin relation or not by examining their
facial attributes. Based on the fact that most of the existing methods focus on gray-scale facial images,
thus discarding the chrominance information, this paper investigates the role of color in the verification
of kinship relationships from facial images. In this context, we analyze the effect of chrominance
information on kinship verification and compare the performance of kinship verification from color
images and gray images. Furthermore, our experiments involve in different color spaces and the
combination of weighted features from two color spaces. Experiment results on KinFaceW and
TSKinFace indicate that color images can achieve better performance than gray scale features and HSV
color space performs best. Moreover, this paper also discusses a feature extraction by fusing with
different color spaces. Fusing HSV with YCbCr color spaces can further improve the performance.

Key words: kinship verification, face analysis, color texture features, color spaces