Abstract
The face detection technique has obtained significant development with the huge application of convolutional neural networks. However, various types of occlusion are widespread in face detection, inevitably destroying the visual features of faces and significantly increasing the difficulty of post-processing. These problems make the occluded face detection a challenging and crucial task. In this paper, we propose a new occlusion-aware face detector (OFDet) to deal with the problem of occluded face detection, which mainly includes a hybrid attention module (HAM) and a center-guided non-maximum suppression (cgNMS) algorithm. Specifically, the HAM consists of three types of attention blocks, i.e., spatial attention block (SAB), channel attention block (CAB), and channel-spatial attention block (CSAB), integrated in a hybrid manner. This module can help the network learn more discriminative and robust feature representation by adaptively highlighting the features of more informative visible facial regions and weakening the features of occluded facial regions, contributing to solving the inter-class occlusion issue. The cgNMS introduces the information of center point distance between detected boxes as a new suppression metric to supplement the traditional intersection over union (IoU) metric. This dual-metric design of cgNMS can ensure that it makes the correct post-processing from highly overlapped detected boxes to deal with the intra-class occlusion problem. Experimental results show that our OFDet achieves state-of-the-art results on the MAFA dataset and obtains competitive results on the WIDER FACE and FDDB datasets, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In addition, HAM and cgNMS are highly efficient, and their cost basically does not affect the efficiency of the model.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Behera SK, Rath AK, Sethy PK (2021) Fruits yield estimation using faster r-CNN with miou. Multimed Tools Appl 80(12):19043–19056
Bodla N, Singh B, Chellappa R, Davis LS (2017) Soft-NMS–improving object detection with one line of code. In: IEEE International conference on computer vision, pp 5561–5569
Chen Y, Kalantidis Y, Li J, Yan S, Feng J (2018) A2-nets: Double attention networks. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, vol 31
Chen Y, Song L, Hu Y, He R (2018) Adversarial occlusion-aware face detection. In: IEEE International conference on biometrics theory, applications and systems, pp 1–9
Chen S, Wang X, Chen C, Lu Y, Zhang X, Wen L (2019) DeepSquare: Boosting the learning power of deep convolutional neural networks with elementwise square operators. arXiv:1906.04979
Chen L, Zhang H, Xiao J, Nie L, Shao J, Liu W, Chua T-S (2017) SCA-CNN: Spatial And channel-wise attention in convolutional networks for image captioning. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 5659–5667
Cheng G, Lang C, Wu M, Xie X, Yao X, Han J (2021) Feature enhancement network for object detection in optical remote sensing images. Journal of Remote Sensing 2021
Cheng G, Si Y, Hong H, Yao X, Guo L (2020) Cross-scale feature fusion for object detection in optical remote sensing images. IEEE Geosci Remote Sens Lett 18(3):431–435
Chi C, Zhang S, Xing J, Lei Z, Li SZ, Zou X (2019) Selective refinement network for high performance face detection. In: AAAI Conference on artificial intelligence, vol 33, pp 8231–8238
Dai T, Cai J, Zhang Y, Xia S-T, Zhang L (2019) Second-order attention network for single image super-resolution. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 11065–11074
Fang Z, Ren J, Marshall S, Zhao H, Wang Z, Huang K, Xiao B (2020) Triple loss for hard face detection. Neurocomputing 398:20–30
Fu J, Liu J, Tian H, Li Y, Bao Y, Fang Z, Lu H (2019) Dual attention network for scene segmentation. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 3146–3154
Gählert N, Hanselmann N, Franke U, Denzler J (2020) Visibility guided NMS: Efficient boosting of amodal object detection in crowded traffic scenes. arXiv:2006.08547
Gan Y, Chen J, Yang Z, Xu L (2020) Multiple attention network for facial expression recognition. IEEE Access 8:7383–7393
Gao Z, Xie J, Wang Q, Li P (2019) Global second-order pooling convolutional networks. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 3024–3033
Ge S, Li J, Ye Q, Luo Z (2017) Detecting masked faces in the wild with LLE-CNNs. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 2682–2690
Ghiasi G, Fowlkes CC (2015) Occlusion coherence: Detecting and localizing occluded faces. arXiv:1506.08347
Glorot X, Bengio Y (2010) Understanding the difficulty of training deep feedforward neural networks. In: International conference on artificial intelligence and statistics, pp 249–256
He R, Cao J, Song L, Sun Z, Tan T (2020) Adversarial cross-spectral face completion for NIR-VIS face recognition. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 42(5):1025–1037
He L, Li H, Zhang Q, Sun Z (2018) Dynamic feature learning for partial face recognition. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7054–7063
Hou Q, Zhou D, Feng J (2021) Coordinate attention for efficient mobile network design. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 13713–13722
Hu J, Shen L, Sun G (2018) Squeeze-and-excitation networks. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7132–7141
Hu X, Yang K, Fei L, Wang K (2019) ACNEt: Attention based network to exploit complementary features for rgbd semantic segmentation. In: IEEE International conference on image processing, pp 1440–1444
Huang X, Ge Z, Jie Z, Yoshie O (2020) NMS By representative region: Towards crowded pedestrian detection by proposal pairing. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 10750–10759
Huang Z, Wang X, Huang L, Huang C, Wei Y, Liu W (2019) CCNEt: Criss-cross attention for semantic segmentation. In: IEEE International conference on computer vision, pp 603–612
Huang L, Yuan Y, Guo J, Zhang C, Chen X, Wang J (2019) Interlaced sparse self-attention for semantic segmentation. arXiv:1907.12273
Iliadis M, Wang H, Molina R, Katsaggelos AK (2017) Robust and low-rank representation for fast face identification with occlusions. IEEE Trans Image Process 26(5):2203–2218
Jaderberg M, Simonyan K, Zisserman A, et al. (2015) Spatial transformer networks. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, vol 28
Jain V, Learned-Miller E (2010) FDDB: A Benchmark for face detection in unconstrained settings. Technical Report UM-CS-2010-009, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Kumar A, Marks TK, Mou W, Wang Y, Jones M, Cherian A, Koike-Akino T, Liu X, Feng C (2020) LUVLI face alignment: Estimating landmarks’ location, uncertainty, and visibility likelihood. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 8236–8246
Lee H, Kim H-E, Nam H (2019) SRM: A style-based recalibration module for convolutional neural networks. In: IEEE International conference on computer vision, pp 1854–1862
Li J, Wang Y, Wang C, Tai Y, Qian J, Yang J, Wang C, Li J, Huang F (2019) DSFD: Dual Shot face detector. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 5060–5069
Linsley D, Shiebler D, Eberhardt S, Serre T (2019) Learning what and where to attend. In: International conference on learning representations
Liu S, Huang D, Wang Y (2019) Adaptive NMS: Refining pedestrian detection in a crowd. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 6459–6468
Liu Y, Tang X (2020) BFBOx: Searching face-appropriate backbone and feature pyramid network for face detector. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 13568–13577
Liu Y, Tang X, Wu X, Han J, Liu J, Ding E (2020) HAMBOx: Delving into online high-quality anchors mining for detecting outer faces. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 13043–13051
Lu X, Wang W, Ma C, Shen J, Shao L, Porikli F (2019) See more, know more: Unsupervised video object segmentation with co-attention siamese networks. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 3623–3632
Lu X, Wang W, Shen J, Crandall D, Luo J (2022) Zero-shot video object segmentation with co-attention siamese networks. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 44(4):2228–2242
Lu X, Wang W, Shen J, Crandall D, Van Gool L (2021) Segmenting objects from relational visual data. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell, 1–1
Luo J, Liu J, Lin J, Wang Z (2020) A lightweight face detector by integrating the convolutional neural network with the image pyramid. Pattern Recogn Lett 133:180–187
Mahbub U, Sarkar S, Chellappa R (2019) Partial face detection in the mobile domain. Image Vis Comput 82:1–17
Mathias M, Benenson R, Pedersoli M, Van Gool L (2014) Face detection without bells and whistles. In: European conference on computer vision, pp 720–735
Misra D, Nalamada T, Arasanipalai AU, Hou Q (2021) Rotate to attend: Convolutional triplet attention module. In: IEEE Winter conference on applications of computer vision, pp 3139–3148
Mnih V, Heess N, Graves A, et al. (2014) Recurrent models of visual attention. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, vol 27
Najibi M, Samangouei P, Chellappa R, Davis LS (2017) SSH: Single Stage headless face detector. In: IEEE international conference on computer vision, pp 4875–4884
Nian F, Li T, Bao B-K, Xu C (2020) Relative coordinates constraint for face alignment. Neurocomputing 395:119–127
Opitz M, Waltner G, Poier G, Possegger H, Bischof H (2016) Grid loss: Detecting occluded faces. In: European conference on computer vision, pp 386–402
Park J, Woo S, Lee J. -Y., Kweon IS (2018) BAM: Bottleneck Attention module. In: British machine vision conference, pp 147–157
Qin Z, Zhang P, Wu F, Li X (2021) Fcanet: Frequency channel attention networks. In: IEEE International conference on computer vision, pp 783–792
Roccetti M, Marfia G, Semeraro A (2012) Playing into the wild: a gesture-based interface for gaming in public spaces. J Vis Commun Image Represent 23 (3):426–440
Roccetti M, Marfia G, Zanichelli M (2010) The art and craft of making the tortellino: Playing with a digital gesture recognizer for preparing pasta culinary recipes. Comput Entertain 8(4):1–20
Roy AG, Navab N, Wachinger C (2018) Recalibrating fully convolutional networks with spatial and channel “squeeze and excitation” blocks. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 38(2):540–549
Salscheider NO (2020) FeatureNMS: Non-maximum suppression by learning feature embeddings. In: International conference on pattern recognition, pp 7848–7854
Selvaraju RR, Cogswell M, Das A, Vedantam R, Parikh D, Batra D (2017) Grad-CAM: Visual explanations from deep networks via gradient-based localization. In: IEEE International conference on computer vision, pp 618–626
Triantafyllidou D, Tefas A (2016) Face detection based on deep convolutional neural networks exploiting incremental facial part learning. In: International conference on pattern recognition, pp 3560–3565
Wang X, Girshick R, Gupta A, He K (2018) Non-local neural networks. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7794–7803
Wang F, Jiang M, Qian C, Yang S, Li C, Zhang H, Wang X, Tang X (2017) Residual attention network for image classification. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 3156–3164
Wang K, Peng X, Yang J, Lu S, Qiao Y (2020) Suppressing uncertainties for large-scale facial expression recognition. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 6897–6906
Wang X, Xiao T, Jiang Y, Shao S, Sun J, Shen C (2018) Repulsion loss: Detecting pedestrians in a crowd. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7774–7783
Wang J, Yuan Y, Yu G (2017) Face attention network: An effective face detector for the occluded faces. arXiv:1711.07246
Wang H, Zhu Y, Green B, Adam H, Yuille A, Chen L-C (2020) Axial-deeplab: Stand-alone axial-attention for panoptic segmentation. In: European conference on computer vision, pp 108–126
Woo S, Park J, Lee J-Y, Kweon IS (2018) CBAM: Convolutional Block attention module. In: European conference on computer vision, pp 3–19
Xia BN, Gong Y, Zhang Y, Poellabauer C (2019) Second-order non-local attention networks for person re-identification. In: IEEE International conference on computer vision, pp 3760–3769
Xia Z, Peng W, Khor H-Q, Feng X, Zhao G (2020) Revealing the invisible with model and data shrinking for composite-database micro-expression recognition. IEEE Trans Image Process 29:8590–8605
Yang C, Ablavsky V, Wang K, Feng Q, Betke M (2020) Learning to separate: Detecting heavily-occluded objects in urban scenes. In: European conference on computer vision, pp 530–546
Yang S, Luo P, Loy CC, Tang X (2016) WIDER FACE: A face detection benchmark. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 5525–5533
Yang S, Luo P, Loy CC, Tang X (2017) Faceness-net: Face detection through deep facial part responses. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 40(8):1845–1859
Yang L, Zhang R-Y, Li L, Xie X (2021) SimAM: A simple, parameter-free attention module for convolutional neural networks. In: International conference on machine learning, pp 11863–11874
Yang Z, Zhu L, Wu Y, Yang Y (2020) Gated channel transformation for visual recognition. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 11794–11803
Yu X, Fu Y, Liu T (2017) Face detection: a deep convolutional network method based on grouped facial part. In: IEEE Advanced information technology, electronic and automation control conference, pp 515–519
Yu C, Wang J, Peng C, Gao C, Yu G, Sang N (2018) Learning a discriminative feature network for semantic segmentation. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 1857–1866
Zeng D, Veldhuis R, Spreeuwers L (2021) A survey of face recognition techniques under occlusion. IET Biometrics 10(6):581–606
Zhang H, Dana K, Shi J, Zhang Z, Wang X, Tyagi A, Agrawal A (2018) Context encoding for semantic segmentation. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7151–7160
Zhang T, Li J, Jia W, Sun J, Yang H (2018) Fast and robust occluded face detection in atm surveillance. Pattern Recogn Lett 107:33–40
Zhang J, Lin L, Zhu J, Li Y, Chen Y-c, Hu Y, Hoi CS (2020) Attribute-aware pedestrian detection in a crowd. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 1–1
Zhang S, Wen L, Bian X, Lei Z, Li SZ (2018) Occlusion-aware r-CNN: detecting pedestrians in a crowd. In: European conference on computer vision, pp 637–653
Zhang S, Wen L, Shi H, Lei Z, Lyu S, Li SZ (2019) Single-shot scale-aware network for real-time face detection. Int J Comput Vis 127 (6):537–559
Zhang K, Xiong F, Sun P, Hu L, Li B, Yu G (2019) Double anchor R-CNN for human detection in a crowd. arXiv:1909.09998
Zhang K, Zhang Z, Li Z, Qiao Y (2016) Joint face detection and alignment using multitask cascaded convolutional networks. IEEE Signal Process Lett 23(10):1499–1503
Zhang X, Zhou X, Lin M, Sun J (2018) Shufflenet: An extremely efficient convolutional neural network for mobile devices. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 6848–6856
Zhang S, Zhu X, Lei Z, Shi H, Wang X, Li SZ (2017) S3FD: Single shot scale-invariant face detector. In: IEEE International conference on computer vision, pp 192–201
Zhao H, Ying X, Shi Y, Tong X, Wen J, Zha H (2020) RDCFAce: Radial distortion correction for face recognition. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7721–7730
Zhao H, Zhang Y, Liu S, Shi J, Loy CC, Lin D, Jia J (2018) PSANEt: Point-wise spatial attention network for scene parsing. In: European conference on computer vision, pp 267–283
Zhu X, Ramanan D (2012) Face detection, pose estimation, and landmark localization in the wild. In: IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 2879–2886
Zhu Z, Xu M, Bai S, Huang T, Bai X (2019) Asymmetric non-local neural networks for semantic segmentation. In: IEEE International conference on computer vision, pp 593–602
Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi, China (Program No. 2021ZDLGY15-01).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Additional information
Data availability statement
The MAFA dataset, WIDER FACE dataset, and FDDB dataset used in the study are publicly available. The MAFA dataset can be downloaded from the website: http://www.escience.cn/people/geshiming/mafa.html. The WIDER FACE dataset can be downloaded from the website: http://shuoyang1213.me/WIDERFACE/. The FDDB dataset can be downloaded from the website: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/fddb/index.html.
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Jin, M., Li, H. & Xia, Z. Hybrid attention network and center-guided non-maximum suppression for occluded face detection. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 15143–15170 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13999-2
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13999-2