Face detection is one of the most studied topics in the computer vision community. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face detection benchmark datasets. We show that there is a gap between current face detection performance and the real world requirements. To facilitate future face detection research, we introduce the WIDER FACE dataset, which is 10 times larger than existing datasets. The dataset contains rich annotations, including occlusions, poses, event categories, and face bounding boxes. Faces in the proposed dataset are extremely challenging due to large variations in scale, pose and occlusion, as shown in Fig. 1. Furthermore, we show that WIDER FACE dataset is an effective training source for face detection. We benchmark several representative detection systems, providing an overview of state-of-the-art performance and propose a solution to deal with large scale variation. Finally, we discuss common failure cases that worth to be further investigated. Dataset can be downloaded at: mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk projects WIDERFace
Face detection has been studied for decades in the computer vision literature. Modern face detection algorithms can be categorized into four categories: cascade based methods @cite_31 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_22 @cite_18 , part based methods @cite_41 @cite_19 @cite_43 , channel feature based methods @cite_8 @cite_3 , and neural network based methods @cite_39 @cite_16 @cite_23 . Here we highlight a few notable studies. A detailed survey can be found in @cite_1 @cite_4 . The seminal work by Viola and Jones @cite_18 introduces integral image to compute Haar-like features in constant time. These features are then used to learn AdaBoost classifier with cascade structure for face detection. Various later studies follow a similar pipeline. Among those variants, SURF cascade @cite_15 achieves competitive performance. Chen al @cite_31 learns face detection and alignment jointly in the same cascade framework and obtains promising detection performance.
@cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_15 @cite_41 @cite_8 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_19 @cite_43 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_31 @cite_16
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We present a novel boosting cascade based face detection framework using SURF features. The framework is derived from the well-known Viola-Jones (VJ) framework but distinguished by two key contributions. First, the proposed framework deals with only several hundreds of multidimensional local SURF patches instead of hundreds of thousands of single dimensional haar features in the VJ framework. Second, it takes AUC as a single criterion for the convergence test of each cascade stage rather than the two conflicting criteria (false-positive-rate and detection-rate) in the VJ framework. These modifications yield much faster training convergence and much fewer stages in the final cascade. We made experiments on training face detector from large scale database. Results shows that the proposed method is able to train face detectors within one hour through scanning billions of negative samples on current personal computers. Furthermore, the built detector is comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithm not only on the accuracy but also on the processing speed. 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 describes a face detection framework that is capable of processing images extremely rapidly while achieving high detection rates. There are three key contributions. The first is the introduction of a new image representation called the “Integral Image” which allows the features used by our detector to be computed very quickly. The second is a simple and efficient classifier which is built using the AdaBoost learning algorithm (Freund and Schapire, 1995) to select a small number of critical visual features from a very large set of potential features. The third contribution is a method for combining classifiers in a “cascade” which allows background regions of the image to be quickly discarded while spending more computation on promising face-like regions. A set of experiments in the domain of face detection is presented. The system yields face detection performance comparable to the best previous systems (Sung and Poggio, 1998; , 1998; Schneiderman and Kanade, 2000; , 2000). Implemented on a conventional desktop, face detection proceeds at 15 frames per second. In real-world face detection, large visual variations, such as those due to pose, expression, and lighting, demand an advanced discriminative model to accurately differentiate faces from the backgrounds. Consequently, effective models for the problem tend to be computationally prohibitive. To address these two conflicting challenges, we propose a cascade architecture built on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with very powerful discriminative capability, while maintaining high performance. The proposed CNN cascade operates at multiple resolutions, quickly rejects the background regions in the fast low resolution stages, and carefully evaluates a small number of challenging candidates in the last high resolution stage. To improve localization effectiveness, and reduce the number of candidates at later stages, we introduce a CNN-based calibration stage after each of the detection stages in the cascade. The output of each calibration stage is used to adjust the detection window position for input to the subsequent stage. The proposed method runs at 14 FPS on a single CPU core for VGA-resolution images and 100 FPS using a GPU, and achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on two public face detection benchmarks.