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

Multi-Path Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Accurate Detection of Unconstrained "Hard Faces"

Large-scale variations still pose a challenge in unconstrained face detection. To the best of our knowledge, no current face detection algorithm can detect a face as large as 800 x 800 pixels while simultaneously detecting another one as small as 8 x 8 pixels within a single image with equally high accuracy. We propose a two-stage cascaded face detection framework, Multi-Path Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (MP-RCNN), that seamlessly combines a deep neural network with a classic learning strategy, to tackle this challenge. The first stage is a Multi-Path Region Proposal Network (MP-RPN) that proposes faces at three different scales. It simultaneously utilizes three parallel outputs of the convolutional feature maps to predict multi-scale candidate face regions. The "atrous" convolution trick (convolution with up-sampled filters) and a newly proposed sampling layer for "hard" examples are embedded in MP-RPN to further boost its performance. The second stage is a Boosted Forests classifier, which utilizes deep facial features pooled from inside the candidate face regions as well as deep contextual features pooled from a larger region surrounding the candidate face regions. This step is included to further remove hard negative samples. Experiments show that this approach achieves state-of-the-art face detection performance on the WIDER FACE dataset "hard" partition, outperforming the former best result by 9.6% for the Average Precision.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to be presented at CRV 201

From Facial Parts Responses to Face Detection: A Deep Learning Approach

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 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.Comment: To appear in ICCV 201