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
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. Face detection has been one of the most studied topics in the computer vision literature. In this technical report, we survey the recent advances in face detection for the past decade. The seminal Viola-Jones face detector is first reviewed. We then survey the various techniques according to how they extract features and what learning algorithms are adopted. It is our hope that by reviewing the many existing algorithms, we will see even better algorithms developed to solve this fundamental computer vision problem. 1 We propose a method to address challenges in unconstrained face detection, such as arbitrary pose variations and occlusions. First, a new image feature called Normalized Pixel Difference (NPD) is proposed. NPD feature is computed as the difference to sum ratio between two pixel values, inspired by the Weber Fraction in experimental psychology. The new feature is scale invariant, bounded, and is able to reconstruct the original image. Second, we propose a deep quadratic tree to learn the optimal subset of NPD features and their combinations, so that complex face manifolds can be partitioned by the learned rules. This way, only a single soft-cascade classifier is needed to handle unconstrained face detection. Furthermore, we show that the NPD features can be efficiently obtained from a look up table, and the detection template can be easily scaled, making the proposed face detector very fast. Experimental results on three public face datasets (FDDB, GENKI, and CMU-MIT) show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in detecting unconstrained faces with arbitrary pose variations and occlusions in cluttered scenes. This paper presents a novel learning framework for training boosting cascade based object detector from large scale dataset. The framework is derived from the well-known Viola-Jones (VJ) framework but distinguished by three key differences. First, the proposed framework adopts multi-dimensional SURF features instead of single dimensional Haar features to describe local patches. In this way, the number of used local patches can be reduced from hundreds of thousands to several hundreds. Second, it adopts logistic regression as weak classifier for each local patch instead of decision trees in the VJ framework. Third, we adopt AUC as a single criterion for the convergence test during cascade training rather than the two trade-off criteria (false-positive-rate and hit-rate) in the VJ framework. The benefit is that the false-positive-rate can be adaptive among different cascade stages, and thus yields much faster convergence speed of SURF cascade. Combining these points together, the proposed approach has three good properties. First, the boosting cascade can be trained very efficiently. Experiments show that the proposed approach can train object detectors from billions of negative samples within one hour even on personal computers. Second, the built detector is comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithm not only on the accuracy but also on the processing speed. Third, the built detector is small in model-size due to short cascade stages. We present a face detection algorithm based on Deformable Part Models and deep pyramidal features. The proposed method called DP2MFD is able to detect faces of various sizes and poses in unconstrained conditions. It reduces the gap in training and testing of DPM on deep features by adding a normalization layer to the deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Extensive experiments on four publicly available unconstrained face detection datasets show that our method is able to capture the meaningful structure of faces and performs significantly better than many competitive face detection algorithms. Deep learning methods are powerful tools but often suffer from expensive computation and limited flexibility. An alternative is to combine light-weight models with deep representations. As successful cases exist in several visual problems, a unified framework is absent. In this paper, we revisit two widely used approaches in computer vision, namely filtered channel features and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and absorb merits from both by proposing an integrated method called Convolutional Channel Features (CCF). CCF transfers low-level features from pre-trained CNN models to feed the boosting forest model. With the combination of CNN features and boosting forest, CCF benefits from the richer capacity in feature representation compared with channel features, as well as lower cost in computation and storage compared with end-to-end CNN methods. We show that CCF serves as a good way of tailoring pre-trained CNN models to diverse tasks without fine-tuning the whole network to each task by achieving state-of-the-art performances in pedestrian detection, face detection, edge detection and object proposal generation. Images containing faces are essential to intelligent vision-based human-computer interaction, and research efforts in face processing include face recognition, face tracking, pose estimation and expression recognition. However, many reported methods assume that the faces in an image or an image sequence have been identified and localized. To build fully automated systems that analyze the information contained in face images, robust and efficient face detection algorithms are required. Given a single image, the goal of face detection is to identify all image regions which contain a face, regardless of its 3D position, orientation and lighting conditions. Such a problem is challenging because faces are non-rigid and have a high degree of variability in size, shape, color and texture. Numerous techniques have been developed to detect faces in a single image, and the purpose of this paper is to categorize and evaluate these algorithms. We also discuss relevant issues such as data collection, evaluation metrics and benchmarking. After analyzing these algorithms and identifying their limitations, we conclude with several promising directions for future research. Face detection has drawn much attention in recent decades since the seminal work by Viola and Jones. While many subsequences have improved the work with more powerful learning algorithms, the feature representation used for face detection still can’t meet the demand for effectively and efficiently handling faces with large appearance variance in the wild. To solve this bottleneck, we borrow the concept of channel features to the face detection domain, which extends the image channel to diverse types like gradient magnitude and oriented gradient histograms and therefore encodes rich information in a simple form. We adopt a novel variant called aggregate channel features, make a full exploration of feature design, and discover a multiscale version of features with better performance. To deal with poses of faces in the wild, we propose a multi-view detection approach featuring score re-ranking and detection adjustment. Following the learning pipelines in ViolaJones framework, the multi-view face detector using aggregate channel features surpasses current state-of-the-art detectors on AFW and FDDB testsets, while runs at 42 FPS In this paper we consider the problem of multi-view face detection. While there has been significant research on this problem, current state-of-the-art approaches for this task require annotation of facial landmarks, e.g. TSM [25], or annotation of face poses [28, 22]. They also require training dozens of models to fully capture faces in all orientations, e.g. 22 models in HeadHunter method [22]. In this paper we propose Deep Dense Face Detector (DDFD), a method that does not require pose landmark annotation and is able to detect faces in a wide range of orientations using a single model based on deep convolutional neural networks. The proposed method has minimal complexity; unlike other recent deep learning object detection methods [9], it does not require additional components such as segmentation, bounding-box regression, or SVM classifiers. Furthermore, we analyzed scores of the proposed face detector for faces in different orientations and found that 1) the proposed method is able to detect faces from different angles and can handle occlusion to some extent, 2) there seems to be a correlation between distribution of positive examples in the training set and scores of the proposed face detector. The latter suggests that the proposed method's performance can be further improved by using better sampling strategies and more sophisticated data augmentation techniques. Evaluations on popular face detection benchmark datasets show that our single-model face detector algorithm has similar or better performance compared to the previous methods, which are more complex and require annotations of either different poses or facial landmarks. Despite the successes in the last two decades, the state-of-the-art face detectors still have problems in dealing with images in the wild due to large appearance variations. Instead of leaving appearance variations directly to statistical learning algorithms, we propose a hierarchical part based structural model to explicitly capture them. The model enables part subtype option to handle local appearance variations such as closed and open month, and part deformation to capture the global appearance variations such as pose and expression. In detection, candidate window is fitted to the structural model to infer the part location and part subtype, and detection score is then computed based on the fitted configuration. In this way, the influence of appearance variation is reduced. Besides the face model, we exploit the co-occurrence between face and body, which helps to handle large variations, such as heavy occlusions, to further boost the face detection performance. We present a phrase based representation for body detection, and propose a structural context model to jointly encode the outputs of face detector and body detector. Benefit from the rich structural face and body information, as well as the discriminative structural learning algorithm, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on FDDB, AFW and a self-annotated dataset, under wide comparisons with commercial and academic methods. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. We present a unified model for face detection, pose estimation, and landmark estimation in real-world, cluttered images. Our model is based on a mixtures of trees with a shared pool of parts; we model every facial landmark as a part and use global mixtures to capture topological changes due to viewpoint. We show that tree-structured models are surprisingly effective at capturing global elastic deformation, while being easy to optimize unlike dense graph structures. We present extensive results on standard face benchmarks, as well as a new “in the wild” annotated dataset, that suggests our system advances the state-of-the-art, sometimes considerably, for all three tasks. Though our model is modestly trained with hundreds of faces, it compares favorably to commercial systems trained with billions of examples (such as Google Picasa and face.com). In this paper, we propose a novel deep convolutional network (DCN) that achieves outstanding performance on FDDB, PASCAL Face, and AFW. Specifically, our method achieves a high recall rate of 90.99 on the challenging FDDB benchmark, outperforming the state-of-the-art method [23] by a large margin of 2.91 . Importantly, we consider finding faces from a new perspective through scoring facial parts responses by their spatial structure and arrangement. The scoring mechanism is carefully formulated considering challenging cases where faces are only partially visible. This consideration allows our network to detect faces under severe occlusion and unconstrained pose variation, which are the main difficulty and bottleneck of most existing face detection approaches. We show that despite the use of DCN, our network can achieve practical runtime speed. Rotation invariant multiview face detection (MVFD) aims to detect faces with arbitrary rotation-in-plane (RIP) and rotation-off-plane (ROP) angles in still images or video sequences. MVFD is crucial as the first step in automatic face processing for general applications since face images are seldom upright and frontal unless they are taken cooperatively. In this paper, we propose a series of innovative methods to construct a high-performance rotation invariant multiview face detector, including the width-first-search (WFS) tree detector structure, the vector boosting algorithm for learning vector-output strong classifiers, the domain-partition-based weak learning method, the sparse feature in granular space, and the heuristic search for sparse feature selection. As a result of that, our multiview face detector achieves low computational complexity, broad detection scope, and high detection accuracy on both standard testing sets and real-life images We present a new state-of-the-art approach for face detection. The key idea is to combine face alignment with detection, observing that aligned face shapes provide better features for face classification. To make this combination more effective, our approach learns the two tasks jointly in the same cascade framework, by exploiting recent advances in face alignment. Such joint learning greatly enhances the capability of cascade detection and still retains its realtime performance. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves the best accuracy on challenging datasets, where all existing solutions are either inaccurate or too slow. 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.