In this paper, we propose a novel face detection network with three novel contributions that address three key aspects of face detection, including better feature learning, progressive loss design and anchor assign based data augmentation, respectively. First, we propose a Feature Enhance Module (FEM) for enhancing the original feature maps to extend the single shot detector to dual shot detector. Second, we adopt Progressive Anchor Loss (PAL) computed by two different sets of anchors to effectively facilitate the features. Third, we use an Improved Anchor Matching (IAM) by integrating novel anchor assign strategy into data augmentation to provide better initialization for the regressor. Since these techniques are all related to the two-stream design, we name the proposed network as Dual Shot Face Detector (DSFD). Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks, WIDER FACE and FDDB, demonstrate the superiority of DSFD over the state-of-the-art face detectors.
Feature Learning Early works on face detection mainly rely on hand-crafted features, such as Harr-like features @cite_14 , control point set @cite_0 , edge orientation histograms @cite_2 . However, hand-crafted features design is lack of guidance. With the great progress of deep learning, hand-crafted features have been replaced by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). For example, Overfeat @cite_12 , Cascade-CNN @cite_24 , MTCNN @cite_11 adopt CNN as a sliding window detector on image pyramid to build feature pyramid. However, using an image pyramid is slow and memory inefficient. As the result, most two stage detectors extract features on single scale. R-CNN @cite_16 @cite_23 obtains region proposals by selective search @cite_10 , and then forwards each normalized image region through a CNN to classify. Faster R-CNN @cite_4 , R-FCN @cite_9 employ Region Proposal Network (RPN) to generate initial region proposals. Besides, ROI-pooling @cite_4 and position-sensitive RoI pooling @cite_9 are applied to extract features from each region.
@cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_9 @cite_0 @cite_24 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_11
2772572186 2495387757 2417750831 2410641892
Recent years have witnessed promising results of face detection using deep learning, especially for the family of region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNN) methods and their variants. Despite making remarkable progresses, face detection in the wild remains an open research challenge especially when detecting faces at vastly different scales and characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of "Feature Agglomeration Networks" (FAN) to build a new single stage face detector, which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also runs efficiently. As inspired by the recent success of Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) lin2016fpn for generic object detection, the core idea of our framework is to exploit inherent multi-scale features of a single convolutional neural network to detect faces of varied scales and characteristics by aggregating higher-level semantic feature maps of different scales as contextual cues to augment lower-level feature maps via a hierarchical agglomeration manner at marginal extra computation cost. Unlike the existing FPN approach, we construct our FAN architecture using a new Agglomerative Connection module and further propose a Hierarchical Loss to effectively train the FAN model. We evaluate the proposed FAN detector on several public face detection benchmarks and achieved new state-of-the-art results with real-time detection speed on GPU. Large pose variations remain to be a challenge that confronts real-word face detection. We propose a new cascaded Convolutional Neural Network, dubbed the name Supervised Transformer Network, to address this challenge. The first stage is a multi-task Region Proposal Network (RPN), which simultaneously predicts candidate face regions along with associated facial landmarks. The candidate regions are then warped by mapping the detected facial landmarks to their canonical positions to better normalize the face patterns. The second stage, which is a RCNN, then verifies if the warped candidate regions are valid faces or not. We conduct end-to-end learning of the cascaded network, including optimizing the canonical positions of the facial landmarks. This supervised learning of the transformations automatically selects the best scale to differentiate face non-face patterns. By combining feature maps from both stages of the network, we achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracies on several public benchmarks. For real-time performance, we run the cascaded network only on regions of interests produced from a boosting cascade face detector. Our detector runs at 30 FPS on a single CPU core for a VGA-resolution image. This paper presents a method for face detection in the wild, which integrates a ConvNet and a 3D mean face model in an end-to-end multi-task discriminative learning framework. The 3D mean face model is predefined and fixed (e.g., we used the one provided in the AFLW dataset). The ConvNet consists of two components: (i) The face proposal component computes face bounding box proposals via estimating facial key-points and the 3D transformation (rotation and translation) parameters for each predicted key-point w.r.t. the 3D mean face model. (ii) The face verification component computes detection results by pruning and refining proposals based on facial key-points based configuration pooling. The proposed method addresses two issues in adapting state-of-the-art generic object detection ConvNets (e.g., faster R-CNN) for face detection: (i) One is to eliminate the heuristic design of predefined anchor boxes in the region proposals network (RPN) by exploiting a 3D mean face model. (ii) The other is to replace the generic RoI (Region-of-Interest) pooling layer with a configuration pooling layer to respect underlying object structures. The multi-task loss consists of three terms: the classification Softmax loss and the location smooth (l_1 )-losses of both the facial key-points and the face bounding boxes. In experiments, our ConvNet is trained on the AFLW dataset only and tested on the FDDB benchmark with fine-tuning and on the AFW benchmark without fine-tuning. The proposed method obtains very competitive state-of-the-art performance in the two benchmarks. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great performance as general feature representations for object recognition applications. However, for multi-label images that contain multiple objects from different categories, scales and locations, global CNN features are not optimal. In this paper, we incorporate local information to enhance the feature discriminative power. In particular, we first extract object proposals from each image. With each image treated as a bag and object proposals extracted from it treated as instances, we transform the multi-label recognition problem into a multi-class multi-instance learning problem. Then, in addition to extracting the typical CNN feature representation from each proposal, we propose to make use of ground-truth bounding box annotations (strong labels) to add another level of local information by using nearest-neighbor relationships of local regions to form a multi-view pipeline. The proposed multi-view multiinstance framework utilizes both weak and strong labels effectively, and more importantly it has the generalization ability to even boost the performance of unseen categories by partial strong labels from other categories. Our framework is extensively compared with state-of-the-art handcrafted feature based methods and CNN based methods on two multi-label benchmark datasets. The experimental results validate the discriminative power and the generalization ability of the proposed framework. With strong labels, our framework is able to achieve state-of-the-art results in both datasets.