Finding Tiny Faces in the Wild With Generative Adversarial Network

Yancheng Bai, Yongqiang Zhang, Mingli Ding, Bernard Ghanem; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 21-30

Face detection techniques have been developed for decades, and one of remaining open challenges is detecting small faces in unconstrained conditions. The reason is that tiny faces are often lacking detailed information and blurring. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm to directly generate a clear high-resolution face from a blurry small one by adopting a generative adversarial network (GAN). Toward this end, the basic GAN formulation achieves it by super-resolving and refining sequentially (e.g. SR-GAN and cycle-GAN). However, we design a novel network to address the problem of super-resolving and refining jointly. We also introduce new training losses to guide the generator network to recover fine details and to promote the discriminator network to distinguish real vs. fake and face vs. non-face simultaneously. Extensive experiments on the challenging dataset WIDER FACE demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in restoring a clear high-resolution face from a blurry small one, and show that the detection performance outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.