  In this paper we consider the problem of multi-view face detection. While
there has been significant research on this problem, current state-of-the-art
approaches for this task require annotation of facial landmarks, e.g. TSM [25],
or annotation of face poses [28, 22]. They also require training dozens of
models to fully capture faces in all orientations, e.g. 22 models in HeadHunter
method [22]. In this paper we propose Deep Dense Face Detector (DDFD), a method
that does not require pose/landmark annotation and is able to detect faces in a
wide range of orientations using a single model based on deep convolutional
neural networks. The proposed method has minimal complexity; unlike other
recent deep learning object detection methods [9], it does not require
additional components such as segmentation, bounding-box regression, or SVM
classifiers. Furthermore, we analyzed scores of the proposed face detector for
faces in different orientations and found that 1) the proposed method is able
to detect faces from different angles and can handle occlusion to some extent,
2) there seems to be a correlation between dis- tribution of positive examples
in the training set and scores of the proposed face detector. The latter
suggests that the proposed methods performance can be further improved by using
better sampling strategies and more sophisticated data augmentation techniques.
Evaluations on popular face detection benchmark datasets show that our
single-model face detector algorithm has similar or better performance compared
to the previous methods, which are more complex and require annotations of
either different poses or facial landmarks.
