FAFD: Fast and Accurate Face Detector

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have contributed a significant performance improvement in face detection. However, since most models focus only on the improvement of detection accuracy with computationally expensive structures, it is still far from real-time applications with a fast face detector. The goal of this paper is to improve face detection performance from the speed-focusing point of view. To this end, we propose a novel Fast and Accurate Face Detector (FAFD) to achieve high performance on both speed and accuracy performance. Specifically, based on the YOLOv5 model, we add one prediction head to increase the detection performance, especially for small faces. In addition, to increase the detection performance of multi-scale faces, we propose to add a novel Multi-Scale Image Fusion (MSIF) layer to the backbone network. We also propose an improved Copy-Paste to augment the training images with face objects in various scales. Experimental results on the WiderFace dataset show that the proposed FAFD achieves the best performance among the existing methods in a Speed-Focusing group. On three sub-datasets of WiderFace (i.e., Easy, Medium, and Hard sub-datasets), our FAFD yields average precisions (AP) of 95.0%, 93.5%, and 87.0%, respectively. Also, the speed performance of the FAFD is fast enough to be included in the group of speed-focusing methods.