Face detection is essential to facial analysis tasks, such as facial reenactment and face recognition. Both cascade face detectors and anchor-based face detectors have translated shining demos into practice and received intensive attention from the community. However, cascade face detectors often suffer from a low detection accuracy, while anchor-based face detectors rely heavily on very large neural networks pre-trained on large-scale image classification datasets such as ImageNet, which is not computationally efficient for both training and deployment. In this paper, we devise an efficient anchor-based cascade framework called anchor cascade. To improve the detection accuracy by exploring contextual information, we further propose a context pyramid maxout mechanism for anchor cascade. As a result, anchor cascade can train very efficient face detection models with a high detection accuracy. Specifically, compared with a popular convolutional neural network (CNN)-based cascade face detector MTCNN, our anchor cascade face detector greatly improves the detection accuracy, e.g., from 0.9435 to 0.9704 at @math false positives on FDDB, while it still runs in comparable speed. Experimental results on two widely used face detection benchmarks, FDDB and WIDER FACE, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
. CNNs have recently contributed significantly to the progress in image classification @cite_1 . Inspired by this, CNNs have been introduced to cascade face detection @cite_40 and improved by jointly training all stages @cite_2 . Recently, CNN-based cascade face detectors have been further improved by using multi-task learning, i.e., jointly learning face non-face classification, bounding box regression as well facial key point detection @cite_24 .
@cite_24 @cite_40 @cite_1 @cite_2
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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. 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. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve substantial improvements in face detection in the wild. Classical CNN-based face detection methods simply stack successive layers of filters where an input sample should pass through all layers before reaching a face non-face decision. Inspired by the fact that for face detection, filters in deeper layers can discriminate between difficult face non-face samples while those in shallower layers can efficiently reject simple non-face samples, we propose Inside Cascaded Structure that introduces face non-face classifiers at different layers within the same CNN. In the training phase, we propose data routing mechanism which enables different layers to be trained by different types of samples, and thus deeper layers can focus on handling more difficult samples compared with traditional architecture. In addition, we introduce a two-stream contextual CNN architecture that leverages body part information adaptively to enhance face detection. Extensive experiments on the challenging FD-DB and WIDER FACE benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy to the state-of-the-art techniques while keeps real time performance. Cascade has been widely used in face detection, where classifier with low computation cost can be firstly used to shrink most of the background while keeping the recall. The cascade in detection is popularized by seminal Viola-Jones framework and then widely used in other pipelines, such as DPM and CNN. However, to our best knowledge, most of the previous detection methods use cascade in a greedy manner, where previous stages in cascade are fixed when training a new stage. So optimizations of different CNNs are isolated. In this paper, we propose joint training to achieve end-to-end optimization for CNN cascade. We show that the back propagation algorithm used in training CNN can be naturally used in training CNN cascade. We present how jointly training can be conducted on naive CNN cascade and more sophisticated region proposal network (RPN) and fast R-CNN. Experiments on face detection benchmarks verify the advantages of the joint training.