Occlusion Coherence: Detecting and Localizing Occluded Faces
This addresses the challenge of occluded face recognition for computer vision applications, representing an incremental advance with a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackled the problem of face detection and landmark localization under occlusion by introducing a hierarchical deformable part model that explicitly models part occlusion, resulting in improved detection for occluded instances while maintaining competitive accuracy for unoccluded ones.
The presence of occluders significantly impacts object recognition accuracy. However, occlusion is typically treated as an unstructured source of noise and explicit models for occluders have lagged behind those for object appearance and shape. In this paper we describe a hierarchical deformable part model for face detection and landmark localization that explicitly models part occlusion. The proposed model structure makes it possible to augment positive training data with large numbers of synthetically occluded instances. This allows us to easily incorporate the statistics of occlusion patterns in a discriminatively trained model. We test the model on several benchmarks for landmark localization and detection including challenging new data sets featuring significant occlusion. We find that the addition of an explicit occlusion model yields a detection system that outperforms existing approaches for occluded instances while maintaining competitive accuracy in detection and landmark localization for unoccluded instances.