Real-Time Pre-Identification and Cascaded Detection for Tiny Faces

Although the face detection problem has been studied for decades, searching tiny faces in the whole image is still a challenging task, especially in low-resolution images. Traditional face detection methods are based on hand-crafted features, but the features of tiny faces are different from those of normal-sized faces, and thus the detection robustness cannot be guaranteed. In order to alleviate the problem in existing methods, we propose a pre-identification mechanism and a cascaded detector (PMCD) for tiny-face detection. This pre-identification mechanism can greatly reduce background and other irrelevant information. The cascade detector is designed with two stages of deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect tiny faces in a coarse-to-fine manner, i.e., the face-area candidates are pre-identified as region of interest (RoI) based on a real-time pedestrian detector and the pre-identification mechanism, the set of RoI candidates is the input of the second sub-network instead of the whole image. Benefiting from the above mechanism, the second sub-network is designed as a shallow network which can keep high accuracy and real-time performance. The accuracy of PMCD is at least 4% higher than the other state-of-the-art methods on detecting tiny faces, while keeping real-time performance.