Compact Convolutional Neural Network Cascade for Face Detection
This work addresses the need for efficient face detection in real-time systems, such as mobile platforms, by offering a computationally efficient solution that is competitive with state-of-the-art methods.
The paper tackles the problem of real-time face detection by proposing a compact convolutional neural network cascade that achieves competitive accuracy on the FDDB dataset while significantly exceeding the speed of existing CPU- and GPU-based algorithms, enabling real-time processing of 4K Ultra HD video at up to 27 fps on mobile platforms.
The problem of faces detection in images or video streams is a classical problem of computer vision. The multiple solutions of this problem have been proposed, but the question of their optimality is still open. Many algorithms achieve a high quality face detection, but at the cost of high computational complexity. This restricts their application in the real-time systems. This paper presents a new solution of the frontal face detection problem based on compact convolutional neural networks cascade. The test results on FDDB dataset show that it is competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms. This proposed detector is implemented using three technologies: SSE/AVX/AVX2 instruction sets for Intel CPUs, Nvidia CUDA, OpenCL. The detection speed of our approach considerably exceeds all the existing CPU-based and GPU-based algorithms. Because of high computational efficiency, our detector can processing 4K Ultra HD video stream in real time (up to 27 fps) on mobile platforms (Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs and Nvidia Kepler GPUs) in searching objects with the dimension 60x60 pixels or higher. At the same time its performance weakly dependent on the background and number of objects in scene. This is achieved by the asynchronous computation of stages in the cascade.