A search based approach to non maximum suppression in face detection

Face detectors typically produce a large number of false positives and this leads to the need to have a further non maximum suppression stage to eliminate multiple and spurious responses. This stage is based on considering spatial heuristics: true positive responses are selected by implicitly considering several restrictions on the spatial distribution of detector responses in natural images. In this paper we analyze the limitations of this approach and propose an efficient search method to overcome them. Results show how the application of this new non-maximum suppression approach to a simple face detector boosts its performance to state of the art results.