Feature map masking based single-stage face detection

Although great progress has been made in face detection, a trade-off between speed and accuracy is still a great challenge. We propose in this paper a feature map masking based approach for single-stage face detection. As feature maps extracted from feature pyramid network might contain face unrelated features, we propose a mask generation branch to predict those significant units for face detection. The masked feature maps, where only important features are left, are then passed through the following detection process. Ground truth masks, directly generated from the training images, based on the face bounding boxes, are used to train the feature mask generation module. A mask constrained dropout module has also been proposed to drop out significant units of the shared feature maps, such that the detection performance can be further improved. The proposed approach is extensively tested using the WIDER FACE dataset. The results suggest that our detector with ResNet-152 backbone, achieves the best precision-recall performance among competing methods. As high as 95.4%, 94.0% and 86.9% accuracies have been achieved on the easy, medium and hard subsets, respectively.