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.
Contextual information is important to improve face detection. In @cite_10 , context is modeled by enlarging the window around proposals. For face detection, CMS-RCNN @cite_7 utilizes a larger window with the cost of duplicating the classification head. This increases the memory requirement as well as detection time. SSH @cite_15 uses the idea of inception module to create context module. While in our Agglomeration Connection module, other than an inception-like context module, we also incorporate the semantics from a deeper feature maps through agglomeration manner.
@cite_15 @cite_10 @cite_7
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We introduce the Single Stage Headless (SSH) face detector. Unlike two stage proposal-classification detectors, SSH detects faces in a single stage directly from the early convolutional layers in a classification network. SSH is headless. That is, it is able to achieve state-of-the-art results while removing the "head" of its underlying classification network -- i.e. all fully connected layers in the VGG-16 which contains a large number of parameters. Additionally, instead of relying on an image pyramid to detect faces with various scales, SSH is scale-invariant by design. We simultaneously detect faces with different scales in a single forward pass of the network, but from different layers. These properties make SSH fast and light-weight. Surprisingly, with a headless VGG-16, SSH beats the ResNet-101-based state-of-the-art on the WIDER dataset. Even though, unlike the current state-of-the-art, SSH does not use an image pyramid and is 5X faster. Moreover, if an image pyramid is deployed, our light-weight network achieves state-of-the-art on all subsets of the WIDER dataset, improving the AP by 2.5 . SSH also reaches state-of-the-art results on the FDDB and Pascal-Faces datasets while using a small input size, leading to a runtime of 50 ms image on a GPU. The code is available at this https URL. This paper addresses the problem of learning from very large databases where batch learning is impractical or even infeasible. Bootstrap is a popular technique applicable in such situations. We show that sampling strategy used for bootstrapping has a significant impact on the resulting classifier performance. We design a new general sampling strategy ”quasi-random weighted sampling + trimming” (QWS+) that includes well established strategies as special cases. The QWS+ approach minimizes the variance of hypothesis error estimate and leads to significant improvement in performance compared to standard sampling techniques. The superior performance is demonstrated on several problems including profile and frontal face detection. Robust face detection in the wild is one of the ultimate components to support various facial related problems, i.e., unconstrained face recognition, facial periocular recognition, facial landmarking and pose estimation, facial expression recognition, 3D facial model construction, etc. Although the face detection problem has been intensely studied for decades with various commercial applications, it still meets problems in some real-world scenarios due to numerous challenges, e.g., heavy facial occlusions, extremely low resolutions, strong illumination, exceptional pose variations, image or video compression artifacts, etc. In this paper, we present a face detection approach named Contextual Multi-Scale Region-based Convolution Neural Network (CMS-RCNN) to robustly solve the problems mentioned above. Similar to the region-based CNNs, our proposed network consists of the region proposal component and the region-of-interest (RoI) detection component. However, far apart of that network, there are two main contributions in our proposed network that play a significant role to achieve the state-of-the-art performance in face detection. First, the multi-scale information is grouped both in region proposal and RoI detection to deal with tiny face regions. Second, our proposed network allows explicit body contextual reasoning in the network inspired from the intuition of human vision system. The proposed approach is benchmarked on two recent challenging face detection databases, i.e., the WIDER FACE Dataset which contains high degree of variability, as well as the Face Detection Dataset and Benchmark (FDDB). The experimental results show that our proposed approach trained on WIDER FACE Dataset outperforms strong baselines on WIDER FACE Dataset by a large margin, and consistently achieves competitive results on FDDB against the recent state-of-the-art face detection methods.