Deep-learning-based face detection using iterative bounding-box regression

Abstract

Multi-view face detection in open environments is a challenging task due to the diverse variations of face appearances and occlusion. In the task of face detection, localization accuracy is one of the key factors. However, many of the existing methods do not pay enough attention to localization. Some of the current methods have applied localization techniques, but they have not fully realized its potential and realized more accurate localization. In this paper, we propose a deep cascaded detection method that iteratively exploits bounding-box regression, a localization technique, to approach the detection of potential faces in images. In addition, we consider the inherent correlation of classification and bounding-box regression and exploit it to further increase overall performance. In particular, our method leverages a cascaded architecture with three stages of carefully designed deep convolutional networks to predict the existence of faces. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm by comparing it with several popular face-detection algorithms on the widely used AFW and FDDB datasets.