  Detection of partially occluded objects is a challenging computer vision
problem. Standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) detectors fail if parts of
the detection window are occluded, since not every sub-part of the window is
discriminative on its own. To address this issue, we propose a novel loss layer
for CNNs, named grid loss, which minimizes the error rate on sub-blocks of a
convolution layer independently rather than over the whole feature map. This
results in parts being more discriminative on their own, enabling the detector
to recover if the detection window is partially occluded. By mapping our loss
layer back to a regular fully connected layer, no additional computational cost
is incurred at runtime compared to standard CNNs. We demonstrate our method for
face detection on several public face detection benchmarks and show that our
method outperforms regular CNNs, is suitable for realtime applications and
achieves state-of-the-art performance.
