Fast Multi-Scale Face Detection

Computerized human face processing (detection, recognition, synthesis) has known an intense research activity during the last few years. Applications involving human face recognition are very broad with an important commercial impacts. Human face processing is a difficult and challenging task: the space of different facial patterns is huge. The variability of human faces as well as their similarity and the influence of other features like beard, glasses, hair, illumination, background etc., make face recognition or face detection difficult to tackle. The main task during the internship was to study and implement a neural-network based face detection algorithm for general scenes, which has previously been developed within the IDIAP Computer Vision group. It also included the study and design of a multi-scale face detection method. A face database and a camera were available to make tests and perform some benchmarking. The main constaint was to have a real-time or almost real-time face detection system. This has beeen achieved. Evaluation of the face detection capability of the employed neural networks were demonstrated on a variety of still images. In addition, we introdudced an efficient preprocessing stage and a new post-processing strategy to eliminate false detections significantly. This allowed to deploy a single neural network for face detection running in a sequential manner on a standard workstation