16,432 research outputs found
CMS-RCNN: Contextual Multi-Scale Region-based CNN for Unconstrained 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, exceptionally 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.
Firstly, the multi-scale information is grouped both in region proposal and RoI
detection to deal with tiny face regions. Secondly, 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
Empiricism without Magic: Transformational Abstraction in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain
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