Visual Phrases for Exemplar Face Detection

Recently, exemplar based approaches have been successfully applied for face detection in the wild. Contrary to traditional approaches that model face variations from a large and diverse set of training examples, exemplar-based approaches use a collection of discriminatively trained exemplars for detection. In this paradigm, each exemplar casts a vote using retrieval framework and generalized Hough voting, to locate the faces in the target image. The advantage of this approach is that by having a large database that covers all possible variations, faces in challenging conditions can be detected without having to learn explicit models for different variations. Current schemes, however, make an assumption of independence between the visual words, ignoring their relations in the process. They also ignore the spatial consistency of the visual words. Consequently, every exemplar word contributes equally during voting regardless of its location. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that incorporates higher order information in the voting process. We discover visual phrases that contain semantically related visual words and exploit them for detection along with the visual words. For spatial consistency, we estimate the spatial distribution of visual words and phrases from the entire database and then weigh their occurrence in exemplars. This ensures that a visual word or a phrase in an exemplar makes a major contribution only if it occurs at its semantic location, thereby suppressing the noise significantly. We perform extensive experiments on standard FDDB, AFW and G-album datasets and show significant improvement over previous exemplar approaches.