Joint Rotation-Invariance Face Detection and Alignment with Angle-Sensitivity Cascaded Networks
Bowen Yang, Chun Hung Yang, Qi Liu, Xu-Cheng Yin · 2019
Due to the angle variations especially in unconstrained scenarios, face detection and alignment have become challenging tasks. In existing methods, face detection and alignment are always conducted separately, which can greatly increase the computation cost. Moreover, this separation will abandon the inherent correlation underlying the two tasks. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective architecture, named Angle-Sensitivity Cascaded Networks (ASCN), for jointly conducting rotation-invariance face detection and alignment. ASCN mainly consists of three consecutive cascaded networks. Specifically, in the first stage, the rotation angle is predicted and candidate bounding boxes are proposed simultaneously. In the second stage, ASCN further refines the candidates and orientations. In the last stage, ASCN jointly learns the accurate bounding boxes and alignment. Besides, for accurately locating landmarks in hard examples, we introduce a pose-equitable loss to balance the faces with large poses. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the surprising performance of our method. Notably, our method maintains real-time efficiency for both detection and alignment tasks on the ordinary CPU platform.