Detecting Faces Using Inside Cascaded Contextual CNN

Kaipeng Zhang, Zhanpeng Zhang, Hao Wang, Zhifeng Li, Yu Qiao, Wei Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017, pp. 3171-3179

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve substantial improvements in face detection in the wild. Classical CNN-based face detection methods simply stack successive layers of filters where an input sample should pass through all layers before reaching a face/non-face decision. Inspired by the fact that for face detection, filters in deeper layers can discriminate between difficult face/non-face samples while those in shallower layers can efficiently reject simple non-face samples, we propose Inside Cascaded Structure that introduces face/non-face classifiers at different layers within the same CNN. In the training phase, we propose data routing mechanism which enables different layers to be trained by different types of samples, and thus deeper layers can focus on handling more difficult samples compared with traditional architecture. In addition, we introduce a two-stream contextual CNN architecture that leverages body part information adaptively to enhance face detection. Extensive experiments on the challenging FDDB and WIDER FACE benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy to the state-of-the-art techniques while keeps real time performance.