Project 4 (Face detection with a sliding window)
- Emanuel Zgraggen (ez), November 9th, 2011
Introduction
The task given by this assignment is to implement a sliding window face detector based on concepts presented in Dalal-Triggs 2005 and Viola-Jones 2001. The algorithm will be evaluated using a common benchmark for face detection (CMU+MIT test set).
Approach
The sliding window concept is quite simple. By looping over an image with a constant step size, small image patches (36 x 36 pixels) are extracted at different scales. For each patch, the algorithm makes a decision if it contains a face or not. The focus of this project lies on the following 3 steps. They are explained in more detail further below.
- Find a good feature representation for image patches.
- Collect positive and negative training data.
- Train a classifier using collected data.
Feature representation
As presented in Dalal-Triggs 2005
this solution uses Histograms of Oriented Gradient (HOG) to represent an image patch. The algorithm uses
this
specific implementation by
Pedro Felzenszwalb. Some experiments showed that
a bin size of 5 (800-dimensional feature vector for each image patch)
seems to be a good trade-off between accuracy and speed.
Collect training data
The algorithm uses an iterative strategy to collect hard negative image patches.
The classifier gets first trained on randomly sampled non-face patches. In the next iteration
the algorithm runs the classifier on scenes which have no faces and every detection is a false positive.
A new classifier gets then retrained with the initial random samples and the mined false positive patches.
Train a classifier
Two different types of classifiers have been evaluated in this project (see results section for
comparison), linear and non-linear (radial basis function, RBF) SVMs.
When training a linear SVM the lambda parameter has an influence on the
accuracy. Some experiments showed that lambda = 1.0 is good value. For the RBF classifier a sigma
value of 2.0 is used.
Non-linear classifiers tend to be more accurate in general, the problem is that they are slower to train and run. Viola-Jones 2001 introduced the concept of a cascade architecture. They key idea is to chain simpler, smaller classifiers to obtain a complex classifier that is fast in rejecting "easy" non-faces. This solution trains such cascades by combining small (400 positive, 400 negative examples) classifiers. The negative training data for each level is obtained by using the false positive patches of the higher up classifier.
Results
Some example results.
Discussion
The non-linear classifiers get better average precisions, but are slower at detection time. Using a cascade architecture helps to make it faster, but average precisions also drops. For mining hard negatives, I had the problem that the initial classifier is usually already pretty good, so that after a few iterations there were almost no false positives anymore. I added a lot of additional non-face scenes to deal with that issue. In general, adding hard negative data helps to increase the average precision (see the first two entries in the result table). Using drastically more negative training samples helps as well (third entry).