Context-aware CNNs for person head detection
This work addresses the challenge of detecting human heads under varied conditions for computer vision applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled person head detection in natural scenes by extending the local R-CNN detector with global and pairwise contextual cues into a joint CNN framework, resulting in improved detection performance and speed across three datasets.
Person detection is a key problem for many computer vision tasks. While face detection has reached maturity, detecting people under a full variation of camera view-points, human poses, lighting conditions and occlusions is still a difficult challenge. In this work we focus on detecting human heads in natural scenes. Starting from the recent local R-CNN object detector, we extend it with two types of contextual cues. First, we leverage person-scene relations and propose a Global CNN model trained to predict positions and scales of heads directly from the full image. Second, we explicitly model pairwise relations among objects and train a Pairwise CNN model using a structured-output surrogate loss. The Local, Global and Pairwise models are combined into a joint CNN framework. To train and test our full model, we introduce a large dataset composed of 369,846 human heads annotated in 224,740 movie frames. We evaluate our method and demonstrate improvements of person head detection against several recent baselines in three datasets. We also show improvements of the detection speed provided by our model.