Convolutional neural network (CNN) based face detectors are inefficient in handling faces of diverse scales. They rely on either fitting a large single model to faces across a large scale range or multi-scale testing. Both are computationally expensive. We propose Scale-aware Face Detector (SAFD) to handle scale explicitly using CNN, and achieve better performance with less computation cost. Prior to detection, an efficient CNN predicts the scale distribution histogram of the faces. Then the scale histogram guides the zoom-in and zoom-out of the image. Since the faces will be approximately in uniform scale after zoom, they can be detected accurately even with much smaller CNN. Actually, more than 99 of the faces in AFW can be covered with less than two zooms per image. Extensive experiments on FDDB, MALF and AFW show advantages of SAFD.
The CNN based face detection approaches emerged in 1990s @cite_24 . Some of the modules are still widely used, such as sliding window, multi-scale testing and the CNN based classifier to distinguish faces from background. @cite_7 shows that CNN achieves good performance for frontal face detection and @cite_42 further extends it for rotation invariant face detection by training faces of different poses. Despite their good performance, they are too slow when considering the hardware of early years.
@cite_24 @cite_42 @cite_7
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In this paper, we present a neural network-based face detection system. Unlike similar systems which are limited to detecting upright, frontal faces, this system detects faces at any degree of rotation in the image plane. The system employs multiple networks; a "router" network first processes each input window to determine its orientation and then uses this information to prepare the window for one or more "detector" networks. We present the training methods for both types of networks. We also perform sensitivity analysis on the networks, and present empirical results on a large test set. Finally, we present preliminary results for detecting faces rotated out of the image plane, such as profiles and semi-profiles. We present a neural network-based upright frontal face detection system. A retinally connected neural network examines small windows of an image and decides whether each window contains a face. The system arbitrates between multiple networks to improve performance over a single network. We present a straightforward procedure for aligning positive face examples for training. To collect negative examples, we use a bootstrap algorithm, which adds false detections into the training set as training progresses. This eliminates the difficult task of manually selecting nonface training examples, which must be chosen to span the entire space of nonface images. Simple heuristics, such as using the fact that faces rarely overlap in images, can further improve the accuracy. Comparisons with several other state-of-the-art face detection systems are presented, showing that our system has comparable performance in terms of detection and false-positive rates.