WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark
Shuo Yang

Ping LuoChen Change Loy

Xiaoou Tang

Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
{ys014, pluo, ccloy, xtang}@ie.cuhk,edu.hk

Abstract
Face detection is one of the most studied topics in thecomputer vision community. Much of the progresses havebeen made by the availability of face detection benchmark
datasets. We show that there is a gap between current facedetection performance and the real world requirements. To
facilitate future face detection research, we introduce the
WIDER FACE dataset, which is 10 times larger than existing datasets. The dataset contains rich annotations, including occlusions, poses, event categories, and face boundingboxes. Faces in the proposed dataset are extremely challenging due to large variations in scale, pose and occlusion,
as shown in Fig. 1. Furthermore, we show that WIDER
FACE dataset is an effective training source for face detection. We benchmark several representative detection systems, providing an overview of state-of-the-art performanceand propose a solution to deal with large scale variation.
Finally, we discuss common failure cases that worth to befurther investigated.

1. Introduction
Face detection is a critical step to all facial analysis algorithms, including face alignment, face recognition, face
verification, and face parsing. Given an arbitrary image,the goal of face detection is to determine whether or notthere are any faces in the image and, if present, return theimage location and extent of each face [27]. While this appears as an effortless task for human, it is a very difficult
task for computers. The challenges associated with face detection can be attributed to variations in pose, scale, facial
expression, occlusion, and lighting condition, as shown in
Fig. 1. Face detection has made significant progress after
the seminal work by Viola and Jones [22]. Modern face detectors can easily detect near frontal faces and are widelyused in real world applications, such as digital camera andelectronic photo album. Recent research [3, 15, 18, 25, 28]
in this area focuses on the unconstrained scenario, where anumber of intricate factors such as extreme pose, exaggerated expressions, and large portion of occlusion can lead to

Figure 1. We propose a WIDER FACE dataset for face detection, which has a high degree of variability in scale, pose, occlusion, expression, appearance and illumination. We show example
images (cropped) and annotations. The annotated face boundingbox is denoted in green color. The WIDER FACE dataset consistsof 393, 703 labeled face bounding boxes in 32, 203 images (Bestview in color).

large visual variations in face appearance.
Publicly available benchmarks such as FDDB [12],AFW [30], PASCAL FACE [24], have contributed tospurring interest and progress in face detection research.
However, as algorithm performance improves, more challenging datasets are needed to trigger progress and to inspirenovel ideas. Current face detection datasets typically con1

2. Related Work
Brief review of recent face detection methods: Face
detection has been studied for decades in the computer
vision literature. Modern face detection algorithms canbe categorized into four categories: cascade based methods [3, 11, 16, 17, 22], part based methods [20, 24, 30],
channel feature based methods [2, 25], and neural network
based methods [7, 15, 28]. Here we highlight a few notable studies. A detailed survey can be found in [27, 29].
The seminal work by Viola and Jones [22] introduces integral image to compute Haar-like features in constant time.
These features are then used to learn AdaBoost classifier
with cascade structure for face detection. Various later studies follow a similar pipeline. Among those variants, SURF
cascade [16] achieves competitive performance. Chen etal. [3] learns face detection and alignment jointly in thesame cascade framework and obtains promising detection
performance.
One of the well-known part based methods is deformablepart models (DPM) [8]. Deformable part models define
face as a collection of parts and model the connectionsof parts through Latent Support Vector Machine. The
part based methods are more robust to occlusion comparedwith cascade-based methods. A recent study [18] demonstrates state-of-the art performance with just a vanilla DPM,
achieving better results than more sophisticated DPM variants [24, 30]. Aggregated channel feature (ACF) is first

Table 1. Comparison of face detection datasets.

Dataset10-50 pixels

50-300 pixels≤300 pixels

Occlusion labels

Event labels

Pose labels

Properties#Face

Height#ImageTesting#Face

Training#Imagetain a few thousand faces, with limited variations in pose,scale, facial expression, occlusion, and background clutters,
making it difficult to assess for real world performance. As
we will demonstrate, the limitations of datasets have partially contributed to the failure of some algorithms in copingwith heavy occlusion, small scale, and atypical pose.
In this work, we make three contributions. (1) We introduce a large-scale face detection dataset called WIDER
FACE. It consists of 32, 203 images with 393, 703 labeledfaces, which is 10 times larger than the current largest facedetection dataset [13]. The faces vary largely in appearance,
pose, and scale, as shown in Fig. 1. In order to quantify different types of errors, we annotate multiple attributes: occlusion, pose, and event categories, which allows in depth
analysis of existing algorithms. (2) We show an example
of using WIDER FACE through proposing a multi-scale
two-stage cascade framework, which uses divide and conquer strategy to deal with large scale variations. Within thisframework, a set of convolutional networks with various
size of input are trained to deal with faces with a specificrange of scale. (3) We benchmark four representative algorithms [18, 22, 25, 28], either obtained directly from theoriginal authors or reimplemented using open-source codes.
We evaluate these algorithms on different settings and analyze conditions in which existing methods fail.

AFW [30]FDDB [12]PASCAL FACE [24]IJB-A [13]MALF [26]
WIDER FACE

16k
16k

33k
199k

0.2k
2.8k
0.85k
8.3k
5.25k
16k

0.47k
5.1k
1.3k
17k
11.9k
194k

12%
8%
41%
13%
N/A
50%

70%
86%
57%
69%
N/A
43%

18%
6%
2%
18%
N/A
7%

!
!

!

!
!
!

proposed by Dollar et al. [4] to solve pedestrian detection.
Later on, Yang et al. [25] applied this idea on face detection. In particular, features such as gradient histogram, integral histogram, and color channels are combined and used
to learn boosting classifier with cascade structure. Recent
studies [15, 28] show that face detection can be further improved by using deep learning, leveraging the high capacityof deep convolutional networks. We anticipate that the new
WIDER FACE data can benefit deep convolutional networkthat typically requires large amount of data for training.
Existing datasets: We summarize some of the well-known
face detection datasets in Table 1. AFW [30], FDDB [12],and PASCAL FACE [24] datasets are most widely used inface detection. AFW dataset is built using Flickr images. It
has 205 images with 473 labeled faces. For each face, annotations include a rectangular bounding box, 6 landmarks
and the pose angles. FDDB dataset contains the annotations for 5, 171 faces in a set of 2, 845 images. PASCALFACE consists of 851 images and 1, 341 annotated faces.
Recently, IJB-A [13] is proposed for face detection and facerecognition. IJB-A contains 24, 327 images and 49, 759
faces. MALF is the first face detection dataset that supports fine-gained evaluation. MALF [26] consists of 5, 250
images and 11, 931 faces. The FDDB dataset has helped
driving recent advances in face detection. However, it is collected from the Yahoo! news website which biases towardcelebrity faces. The AFW and PASCAL FACE datasets
contain only a few hundred images and has limited variations in face appearance and background clutters. The IJBA dataset has large quantity of labeled data; however, occlusion and pose are not annotated. The MAFL dataset labels
fine-grained face attributes such as occlusion, pose and expression. The number of images and faces are relatively
small. Due to the limited variations in existing datasets,
the performance of recent face detection algorithms saturates on current face detection benchmarks. For instance,on AFW, the best performance is 97.2% AP; on FDDB, thehighest recall is 91.74%; on PASCAL FACE, the best result
is 92.11% AP. The best few algorithms have only marginal
difference.

3. WIDER FACE Dataset
3.1. Overview
To our knowledge, WIDER FACE dataset is currently
the largest face detection dataset, of which images are selected from the publicly available WIDER dataset [23]. We
choose 32, 203 images and label 393, 703 faces with a highdegree of variability in scale, pose and occlusion as depicted
in Fig. 1. WIDER FACE dataset is organized based on 60
event classes. For each event class, we randomly select40%/10%/50% data as training, validation and testing sets.
Here, we specify two training/testing scenarios:• Scenario-Ext: A face detector is trained using any external data, and tested on the WIDER FACE test partition.

Typicalannotation

Heavyocclusion

Partialocclusion

Figure 2. Examples of annotation in WIDER FACE dataset (Bestview in color).
1

1

0.8

• Scenario-Int: A face detector is trained using WIDER
FACE training/validation partitions, and tested on
WIDER FACE test partition.
We adopt the same evaluation metric employed in the PASCAL VOC dataset [6]. Similar to MALF [26] and Caltech [5] datasets, we do not release bounding box groundtruth for the test images. Users are required to submit final
prediction files, which we shall proceed to evaluate.

0.6

0.5

Collection methodology. WIDER FACE dataset is a subsetof the WIDER dataset [23]. The images in WIDER werecollected in the following three steps: 1) Event categories
were defined and chosen following the Large Scale Ontology for Multimedia (LSCOM) [19], which provides around
1, 000 concepts relevant to video event analysis. 2) Images
are retrieved using search engines like Google and Bing. For
each category, 1, 000-3, 000 images were collected. 3) The
data were cleaned by manually examining all the images
and filtering out images without human face. Then, similar
images in each event category were removed to ensure large
diversity in face appearance. A total of 32, 203 images are
eventually included in the WIDER FACE dataset.
Annotation policy. We label the bounding boxes for all
the recognizable faces in the WIDER FACE dataset. The
bounding box is required to tightly contain the forehead,chin, and cheek, as shown in Fig. 2. If a face is occluded,
we still label it with a bounding box but with an estimation on the scale of occlusion. Similar to the PASCAL
VOC dataset [6], we assign an ’Ignore’ flag to the facewhich is very difficult to be recognized due to low resolution and small scale (10 pixels or less). After annotating
the face bounding boxes, we further annotate the following
attributes: pose (typical, atypical) and occlusion level (partial, heavy). Each annotation is labeled by one annotatorand cross-checked by two different people.

0.97

0.95
0.82

0.99

0.846

0.76

0.990.94

0.92

0.515

0.4
0.2

0
2000

AFW
IJB-A
WIDER FACE Easy

4000

6000

8000

PASCAL FACEWIDER FACE Hard

10000

2000

4000

Large scale(a) Overall

0.2

8000

0.71

0.34

0.26

0.32

0.8
0.55

0.52

0.47

0.39

10000

Small scale(b) Scale
0.81

0.77

0.57

0.6
0.4

6000

Medium scale

1

0.8

0.2

0.18

0.15

0.07

0.04

0

FDDB
WIDER FACE Medium

1

0.37

0.39

0.21

0.4
0.2

0

0.83

0.78

0.72
0.62

0.6

0.11

0.4
0.24

0.31

0.34

0.36

6000

8000

10000

0.14

0

2000
No occlusion

3.2. Data Collection

Atypical
pose

4000

6000

Partical occlusion

8000

10000

Heavy occlusion

2000

4000
Typical pose(c) Occlusion

Atypical pose(c) Pose

Figure 3. The detection rate with different number of proposals.
The proposals are generated by using Edgebox [31]. Y-axis denotes for detection rate. X-axis denotes for average number of
proposals per image. Lower detection rate implies higher difficulty. We show histograms of detection rate over the number of
proposal for different settings (a) Different face detection datasets.
(b) Face scale level. (c) Occlusion level. (d) Pose level.

3.3. Properties of WIDER FACEWIDER FACE dataset is challenging due to large variations in scale, occlusion, pose, and background clutters.
These factors are essential to establishing the requirements
for a real world system. To quantify these properties, we
use generic object proposal approaches [1, 21, 31], which
are specially designed to discover potential objects in animage (face can be treated as an object). Through measuring the number of proposals vs. their detection rate offaces, we can have a preliminary assessment on the difficulty of a dataset and potential detection performance. In
the following assessments, we adopt EdgeBox [31] as object proposal, which has good performance in both accuracy
and efficiency as evaluated in [10].
Overall. Fig. 3(a) shows that WIDER FACE has much
lower detection rate compared with other face detection
datasets. The results suggest that WIDER FACE is a morechallenging face detection benchmark compared to exist-

ScaleTraffic
Festival
ParadeDemonstration
Ceremony
People Marching
Basketball
Shoppers
Matador Bullfighter
Car Accident
Election Campain
Concerts
Award Ceremony
PicnicRiot
FuneralCheering
Soldier Firing
Car Racing
Voter
Stock Market
HockeyStudents Schoolkids
Ice Skating
Greeting
Football
Running
people driving car
Soldier Drilling
Photographers
Sports FanGroup
Celebration Or Party
SoccerInterview
Raid
Baseball
Soldier Patrol
AnglerRescueGymnastics
Handshaking
Waiter WaitressPress Conference
Worker Laborer
Parachutist ParatrooperSports Coach Trainer
Meeting
Aerobics
Row Boat
Dancing
Swimming
Family Group
Balloonist
Dresses
CoupleJockeyTennisSpa
Surgeons

1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

Figure 4. Histogram of detection rate for different event categories. Event categories are ranked in an ascending order based on the detection
rate when the number of proposal is fixed at 10, 000. Top 1 − 20, 21 − 40, 41 − 60 event categories are denoted in blue, red, and green,
respectively. Example images for specific event classes are shown. Y-axis denotes for detection rate. X-axis denotes for event class name.

ing datasets. Following the principles in KITTI [9] andMALF [26] datasets, we define three levels of difficulty:’Easy’, ’Medium’, ’Hard’ based on the detection rate of
EdgeBox [31], as shown in the Fig. 3(a). The average recall
rates for these three levels are 92%, 76%, and 34%, respectively, with 8, 000 proposal per image.
Scale. We group the faces by their image size (height in pixels) into three scales: small (between 10-50 pixels), medium(between 50-300 pixels), large (over 300 pixels). We makethis division by considering the detection rate of generic object proposal and human performance. As can be observed
from Fig 3(b), the large and medium scales achieve highdetection rate (more than 90%) with 8, 000 proposals per
image. For the small scale, the detection rates consistently
stay below 30% even we increase the proposal number to
10, 000.
Occlusion. Occlusion is an important factor for evaluating the face detection performance. Similar to a recent
study [26], we treat occlusion as an attribute and assign
faces into three categories: no occlusion, partial occlusion,and heavy occlusion. Specifically, we ask annotator to measure the fraction of occlusion region for each face. A face isdefined as ‘partially occluded’ if 1%-30% of the total facearea is occluded. A face with occluded area over 30% is labeled as ‘heavily occluded’. Fig. 2 shows some examples ofpartial/heavy occlusions. Fig. 3(c) shows that the detection
rate decreases as occlusion level increases. The detection
rates of faces with partial or heavy occlusions are below
50% with 8, 000 proposals.
Pose. Similar to occlusion, we define two pose deformation levels, namely typical and atypical. Fig. 2 shows somefaces of typical and atypical pose. Face is annotated as atypical under two conditions: either the roll or pitch degree islarger than 30-degree; or the yaw is larger than 90-degree.
Fig. 3(d) suggests that faces with atypical poses are muchharder to be detected.
Event. Different events are typically associated with different scenes. WIDER FACE contains 60 event categories covering a large number of scenes in the real world, as shownin Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. To evaluate the influence of event toface detection, we characterize each event with three factors: scale, occlusion, and pose. For each factor we compute the detection rate for the specific event class and thenrank the detection rate in an ascending order. Based on therank, events are divided into three partitions: easy (41-60
classes), medium (21-40 classes) and hard (1-20 classes).
We show the partitions based on scale in Fig. 4. Partitions
based on occlusion and pose are included in the supplementary material.
Effective training source. As shown in the Table 1, existing datasets such as FDDB, AFW, and PASCAL FACE do
not provide training data. Face detection algorithms testedon these datasets are frequently trained with ALFW [14],which is designed for face landmark localization. However,there are two problems. First, ALFW omits annotations ofmany faces with a small scale, low resolution, and heavy
occlusion. Second, the background in ALFW dataset is relatively clean. As a result, many face detection approaches
resort to generate negative samples from other datasets suchas PASCAL VOC dataset. In contrast, all recognizable faces
are labeled in the WIDER FACE dataset. Because of its
event-driven nature, WIDER FACE dataset has a large number of scenes with diverse background, making it possible asa good training source with both positive and negative samples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of WIDER FACE asa training source in Sec. 5.2.

Detection
Network 1

Proposal
Network 1

pixels10-30 pixels

Detection
Network 2

Proposal
Network 2

pixels30-120 pixels

Input Image X

Detection
Network 3

Proposal
Network 3

Final results

pixels120-240 pixels

Detection
Network 4

Proposal
Network 4

pixels240-480 pixels
Multiscale proposal
networks

Response maps

Proposals

Multiscale detection
networks

Stage 1

Detection results

Stage 2

Figure 5. The pipeline of the proposed multi-scale cascade CNN.

4. Multi-scale Detection Cascade

Table 2. Summary of face scale for multi-scale proposal networks.
Scale

We wish to establish a solid baseline for WIDER FACE
dataset. As we have shown in Table 1, WIDER FACE contains faces with a large range of scales. Fig. 3(b) further
shows that faces with a height between 10-50 pixels only
achieve a proposal detection rate of below 30%. In order todeal with the high degree of variability in scale, we propose
a multi-scale two-stage cascade framework and employ adivide and conquer strategy. Specifically, we train a set offace detectors, each of which only deals with faces in a relatively small range of scales. Each face detector consistsof two stages. The first stage generates multi-scale proposals from a fully-convolutional network. The second stage
is a multi-task convolutional network that generates faceand non-face prediction of the candidate windows obtained
from the first stage, and simultaneously predicts for face location. The pipeline is shown in Fig. 5. The two main steps
are explained as follow.
Multi-scale proposal. In this step, we joint train a setof fully convolutional networks for face classification andscale classification. We first group faces into four categories
by their image size, as shown in the Table 2 (each row in thetable represents a category). For each group, we further divide it into three subclasses. Each network is trained withimage patches with the size of their upper bound scale. For
example, Network 1 and Network 2 are trained with 30×30
and 120×120 image patches, respectively. We align a faceat the center of an image patch as positive sample and assign
a scale class label based on the predefined scale subclasses
in each group. For negative samples, we randomly cropped
patches from the training images. The patches should have

Network 1
Network 2
Network 3
Network 4

Class 1

Class 2

Class 3

10-15
15-20
20-30
30-50
50-80
80-120120-160 160-200 200-240
240-320 320-400 400-480

an intersection-over-union (IoU) of smaller than 0.5 withany of the positive samples. We assign a value −1 as thescale class for negative samples, which will have no contribution to the gradient during training.
We take Network 2 as an example. Let {xi }N
i=1 be aset of image patches where ∀xi ∈ R120×120 . Similarly,s N
let {yif }N
i=1 be the set of face class labels and {yi }i=1
f
1×1
be the set of scale class label, where ∀yi ∈ R
and∀yis ∈ R1×3 . Learning is formulated as a multi-variate classification
PN problem by minimizing the cross-entropy loss.
L =  i=1 yi log p(yi = 1|xi ) + (1 − yi ) log 1 − p(yi =1|xi ) , where p(yi |xi ) is modeled as a sigmoid function,
indicating the probability of the presence of a face. This
loss function can be optimized by the stochastic gradientdescent with back-propagation.
Face detection. The prediction of proposed windows fromthe previous stage is refined in this stage. For each scale
category, we refine these proposals by joint training faceclassification and bounding box regression using the same
CNN structure in the previous stage with the same input
size. For face classification, a proposed window is assignedwith a positive label if the IoU between it and the groundtruth bounding box is larger than 0.5; otherwise it is negative. For bounding box regression, each proposal is predicted a position of its nearest ground truth bounding box.

If the proposed window is a false positive, the CNN outputs a vector of [−1, −1, −1, −1]. We adopt the Euclidean
loss and cross-entropy loss for bounding box regression andface classification, respectively. More details of face detection can be found in the supplementary material.

5. Experimental Results
5.1. Benchmarks
As we discussed in Sec. 2, face detection algorithms canbe broadly grouped into four representative categories. For
each class, we pick one algorithm as a baseline method. We
select VJ [22], ACF [25], DPM [18], and Faceness [28] asbaselines. The VJ [22], DPM [18], and Faceness [28] detectors are either obtained from the authors or from open
source library (OpenCV). The ACF [25] detector is reimplemented using the open source code. We adopt the ScenarioExt here (see Sec. 3.1), that is, these detectors were trainedby using external datasets and are used ‘as is’ without
re-training them on WIDER FACE. We employ PASCAL
VOC [6] evaluation metric for the evaluation. Following
previous work [18], we conduct linear transformation foreach method to fit the annotation of WIDER FACE.
Overall. In this experiment, we employ the evaluation setting mentioned in Sec. 3.3. The results are shown in Fig. 6(a.1)-(a.3). Faceness [28] outperforms other methods on
three subsets, with DPM [18] and ACF [25] as marginal
second and third. For the easy set, the average precision(AP) of most methods are over 60%, but none of them surpasses 75%. The performance drops 10% for all methods
on the medium set. The hard set is even more challenging.
The performance quickly decreases, with a AP below 30%
for all methods. To trace the reasons of failure, we examine
performance on varying subsets of the data.
Scale. As described in Sec. 3.3, we group faces according
to the image height: small (10-50 pixels), medium (50-300
pixels), and large (300 or more pixels) scales. Fig. 6 (b.1)(b.3) show the results for each scale on un-occluded faces
only. For the large scale, DPM and Faceness obtain over
80% AP. At the medium scale, Faceness achieves the best
relative result but the absolute performance is only 70% AP.
The results of small scale are abysmal: none of the algorithms is able to achieve more than 12% AP. This showsthat current face detectors are incapable to deal with facesof small scale.
Occlusion. Occlusion handling is a key performance metric for any face detectors. In Fig. 6 (c.1)-(c.3), we show the
impact of occlusion on detecting faces with a height of atleast 30 pixels. As mentioned in Sec. 3.3, we classify faces
into three categories: un-occluded, partially occluded (1%30% area occluded) and heavily occluded (over 30% area
occluded). With partial occlusion, the performance drops
significantly. The maximum AP is only 26.5% achieved by

Faceness. The performance further decreases in the heavy
occlusion setting. The best performance of baseline methods drops to 14.4%. It is worth noting that Faceness andDPM, which are part based models, already perform relatively better than other methods on occlusion handling.
Pose. As discussed in Sec. 3.3, we assign a face pose as
atypical if either the roll or pitch degree is larger than 30degree; or the yaw is larger than 90-degree. Otherwise aface pose is classified as typical. We show results in Fig. 6(d.1)-(d.2). Faces which are un-occluded and with a scalelarger than 30 pixels are used in this experiment. The performance clearly degrades for atypical pose. The best performance is achieved by Faceness, with a recall below 20%.
The results suggest that current face detectors are only capable of dealing with faces with out-of-plane rotation and asmall range of in-plane rotation.
Summary. Among the four baseline methods, Facenesstends to outperform the other methods. VJ performs
poorly on all settings. DPM gains good performance on
medium/large scale and occlusion. ACF outperforms DPM
on small scale, no occlusion and typical pose settings. However, the overall performance is poor on WIDER FACE,
suggesting a large room of improvement.

5.2. WIDER FACE as an Effective Training Source
In this experiment, we demonstrate the effectiveness of
WIDER FACE dataset as a training source. We adopt
Scenario-Int here (see Sec. 3.1). We train ACF and Faceness on WIDER FACE to conduct this experiment. These
two algorithms have shown relatively good performance on
WIDER FACE previous benchmarks see (Sec. 5.1). Faces
with a scale larger than 30 pixels in the training set are used
to retrain both methods. We train the ACF detector using
the same training parameters as the baseline ACF. The negative samples are generated from the training images. For
the Faceness detector, we first employ models shared by theauthors to generate face proposals from the WIDER FACE
training set. After that, we train the classifier with the sameprocedure described in [28]. We test these models (denoted
as ACF-WIDER and Faceness-WIDER) on WIDER FACE
testing set and FDDB dataset.
WIDER FACE. As shown in Fig. 7, the retrained models
perform consistently better than the baseline models. The
average AP improvement of retrained ACF detector is 5.4%
in comparison to baseline ACF detector. For the Faceness,the retrained Faceness model obtain 4.2% improvement on
WIDER hard test set.
FDDB. We further evaluate the retrained models on FDDB
dataset. Similar to WIDER FACE dataset, the retrainedmodels achieve improvement in comparison to the baseline
methods. The retrained ACF detector achieves a recall rateof 87.48%, outperforms the baseline ACF by a considerable
margin of 1.4%. The retrained Faceness detector obtains a

1

0.8

0.8

0.8

0.8

0.6

0.6

0.6

0.6

0.4
ACF-0.642
DPM-0.690
Faceness-0.704
VJ-0.412

0.2
0
0

0.2

0.4

Recall

0.6

0.8

0.4
0.2
0
0

1

0.4

Recall0.6

0.8

ACF-0.530
DPM-0.453
Faceness-0.579
VJ-0.336

0.2
0
0

1

0.2

0.4

Recall

0.6

0.8

0.4

0
0

1

(c.1) No occlusion

0.8

0.8

0.8

0.8

0.6

0.6

0.6

0.6

ACF-0.526
DPM-0.448
Faceness-0.573
VJ-0.333

0
0

0.2

0.4

Recall

0.6

0.8

0.4
ACF-0.621
DPM-0.669
Faceness-0.702
VJ-0.391

0.2
0
0

1

(a.2) Medium set

0.2

0.4

Recall

0.6

0.8

0.4

0
0

1

(b.2) Medium scale
0.8

0.8

0.6

0.6

0.6

0
0

0.2

0.4

Recall0.6

0.8

Precision

0.8
Precision

1

0.2

0.4
ACF-0.688
DPM-0.887
Faceness-0.825
VJ-0.474

0.21(a.3) Hard set

0
0

0.2

0.4

Recall0.6

0.8(b.3) Large scale

0.2

0.4

Recall

0.6

Recall

0.6

0.8

1

0.8

0.4
ACF-0.127
DPM-0.162
Faceness-0.183
VJ-0.053

1

0
0

0.2

0.4

Recall

0.6

0.8

1

(d.2) Extreme pose

0.4
ACF-0.103
DPM-0.121
Faceness-0.144
VJ-0.055

0.2

1

0.4

0.2

(c.2) Partial occlusion

1

ACF-0.252
DPM-0.201
Faceness-0.273
VJ-0.137

ACF-0.190
DPM-0.228
Faceness-0.265
VJ-0.131

0.2

1

0.4

Precision

1

Precision

1

0.2

0.2

(d.1) Typical pose1

0.4

ACF-0.555
DPM-0.469
Faceness-0.610
VJ-0.380

0.2

1Precision

Precision

0.2

0.4

(b.1) Small scale(a.1) Easy set

Precision

ACF-0.115
DPM-0.055
Faceness-0.120
VJ-0.040

Precision

1

Precision

1

Precision

Precision

1

0
0

0.2

0.4

Recall

0.6

0.8

1

(c.3) Heavy occlusion

Figure 6. Precision and recall curves of different subsets of WIDER FACES: (a.1)-(a.3) Overall Easy/Medium/Hard subsets. (b.1)-(b.3)
Small/Medium/Large scale subsets. (c.1)-(c.3) None/Partial/Heavy occlusion subsets. (d.1)-(d.2) Typical/Atypical pose subsets.
Table 3. Comparison of per class AP. To save space, we only show abbreviations of category names here. The event category is organizedbased on the rank sequence in Fig. 4 (from hard to easy events based on scale measure). We compare the accuracy of Faceness and ACF
models retrained on WIDER FACE training set with the baseline Faceness and ACF. With the help of WIDER FACE dataset, accuracies
on 56 out of 60 categories have been improved. The re-trained Faceness model wins 30 out of 60 classes, followed by the ACF model with26 classes. Faceness wins 1 medium class and 3 easy classes.
Traf.
ACF
ACF-WIDER
Faceness
Faceness-WIDER

ACF
ACF-WIDER
Faceness
Faceness-WIDER

Fest. Para. Demo. Cere. March. Bask. Shop. Mata. Acci. Elec. Conc. Awar. Picn. Riot. Fune. Chee. Firi. Raci. Vote.

.421 .368 .431
.385 .435 .528
.497 .376 .459
.535 .451 .560

.330 .521.464 .595.410 .547.454 .626

.381
.490
.434
.495

.452
.562
.481
.525

.503 .308 .254 .409
.603 .334 .352 .538
.575 .388 .323 .461
.593 .432 .358 .489

.512
.486
.569
.576

.720 .475 .388 .502
.797 .550 .395 .568
.730 .526 .455 .563
.737 .621 .486 .579

.474 .320 .552 .457
.589 .432 .669 .532
.496 .439 .577 .535
.555 .454 .635 .558

Stoc. Hock. Stud. Skat. Gree.

Foot. Runn. Driv. Dril. Phot. Spor. Grou. Cele. Socc. Inte. Raid. Base. Patr. Angl. Resc.

.549 .430 .557 .502 .467
.519 .591 .666 .630 .546
.617 .481 .639 .561 .576
.611 .579 .660 .599 .588

.394
.508
.475
.505

.626
.707
.667
.672

.562 .447 .576 .343
.609 .521 .627 .430
.643 .469 .628 .406
.648 .519 .650 .409

.685
.756
.725
.776

.577 .719 .628 .407
.611 .727 .616 .506
.563 .744 .680 .457
.621 .768 .686 .489

.442 .497 .564 .465
.583 .529 .645 .546
.499 .538 .621 .520
.607 .607 .629 .564

Gymn. Hand. Wait. Pres. Work. Parach. Coac. Meet. Aero. Boat. Danc. Swim. Fami. Ball. Dres. Coup. Jock. Tenn. Spa. Surg.
ACF
ACF-WIDER
Faceness
Faceness-WIDER.749 .472 .722 .720 .589
.750 .589 .836 .794 .649
.756 .540 .782 .732 .645
.768 .577 .740 .746 .640

.435
.492
.517
.540

.598
.705
.618
.637

.548 .629 .530 .507
.700 .734 .602 .524
.592 .678 .569 .558
.670 .718 .628 .595

.626
.534
.666
.659

.755 .589 .734 .621
.856 .642 .802 .589
.809 .647 .774 .742
.842 .682 .754 .699

.667 .701 .386 .599
.827 .667 .418 .586
.662 .744 .470 .635
.688 .759 .493 .632

1

0.8

0.8

0.8

0.8

0.6

0.6

0.6

0.6

0.4
ACF−0.639
ACF−WIDER−0.695
Faceness−0.704
Faceness−WIDER−0.713

0.2
0
0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

0.4
ACF−0.521
ACF−WIDER−0.588
Faceness−0.573
Faceness−WIDER−0.604

0.2
0
0

1

0.2

0.4

Recall

0.6

0.8

0.4
ACF−WIDER−0.695
Faceness−WIDER−0.713
Multiscale Cascade CNN−0.711
Two−stage CNN−0.657

0.2

1Recall(a) WIDER Easy

Precision

1

Precision

1

Precision

Precision

1

0
0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

0.4
ACF−WIDER−0.588
Faceness−WIDER−0.604
Multiscale Cascade CNN−0.636
Two−stage CNN−0.589

0.2
0
0

1

0.2

0.4

Recall(b) WIDER Medium

0.6

0.8

1

Recall(a) WIDER Easy(b) WIDER Medium

1

1
0.9

0.8

0.8
Precision

RecallPrecision

0.85

0.6

0.8

0.4

0.6
0.4

0.75

ACF−0.253
ACF−WIDER−0.290
Faceness−0.273
Faceness−WIDER−0.315

0.2
0
0

0.2

0.4

0.6
Recall(c) WIDER Hard

0.8

ACF 0.8607
ACF−WIDER 0.8748
Faceness 0.9098
Faceness−WIDER 0.9178

0.7

1

0.65
0

500

1000
False Positive

1500

0
0

2000

high recall rate of 91.78%. The recall rate improvementof the retrained Faceness detector is 0.8% in comparison
to the baseline Faceness detector. It worth noting that theretrained Faceness detector performs much better than thebaseline Faceness detector when the number of false positive is less than 300.
Event. We evaluate the baseline methods on each eventclass individually and report the results in Table 3. Faces
with a height larger than 30 pixels are used in this experiment. We compare the accuracy of Faceness and ACF models retrained on WIDER FACE training set with the baseline
Faceness and ACF. With the help of WIDER FACE dataset,accuracies on 56 out of 60 event categories have been improved. It is interesting to observe that the accuracy obtained highly correlates with the difficulty levels specified
in Sec. 3.3 (also refer to Fig. 4). For example, the best performance on ”Festival” which is assigned as a hard class is
no more than 46% AP.

5.3. Evaluation of Multi-scale Detection Cascade
In this experiment we evaluate the effectiveness of the
proposed multi-scale cascade algorithm. Apart from the
ACF-WIDER and Faceness-WIDER models (Sec. 5.2), we
establish a baseline based on a ”Two-stage CNN”. Thismodel differs to our multi-scale cascade model in the way
it handles multiple face scales. Instead of having multiple
networks targeted for different scales, the two-stage CNN
adopts a more typical approach. Specifically, its first stage
consists only a single network to perform face classification.
During testing, an image pyramid that encompasses different scales of a test image is fed to the first stage to generate
multi-scale face proposals. The second stage is similar to

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

Recall(c) WIDER Hard(d) FDDB

Figure 7. WIDER FACE as an effective training source. ACFWIDER and Faceness-WIDER are retrained with WIDER FACE,
while ACF and Faceness are the original models. (a)-(c) Precision and recall curves on WIDER Easy/Medium/Hard subsets. (d)ROC curve on FDDB dataset.

ACF−WIDER−0.290
Faceness−WIDER−0.315
Multiscale Cascade CNN−0.400
Two−stage CNN−0.304

0.2

Figure 8. Evaluation of multi-scale detection cascade: (a)-(c) Precision and recall curves on WIDER Easy/Medium/Hard subsets.

our multi-scale cascade model – it performs further refinement on proposals by simultaneous face classification andbounding box regression.
We evaluate the multi-scale cascade CNN and baseline
methods on WIDER Easy/Medium/Hard subsets. As shownin Fig. 8, the multi-scale cascade CNN obtains 8.5% AP improvement on the WIDER Hard subset compared to the retrained Faceness, suggesting its superior capability in handling faces with different scales. In particular, having multiple networks specialized on different scale range is shown
effective in comparison to using a single network to handle multiple scales. In other words, it is difficult for a single network to handle large appearance variations causedby scale. For the WIDER Medium subset, the multi-scalecascade CNN outperforms other baseline methods with aconsiderable margin. All models perform comparably on
the WIDER Easy subset.

6. Conclusion
We have proposed a large, richly annotated WIDER
FACE dataset for training and evaluating face detection algorithms. We benchmark four representative face detection
methods. Even considering an easy subset (typically withfaces of over 50 pixels height), existing state-of-the-art algorithms reach only around 70% AP, as shown in Fig. 8.
With this new dataset, we wish to encourage the community to focusing on some inherent challenges of face detection – small scale, occlusion, and extreme poses. These
factors are ubiquitous in many real world applications. For
instance, faces captured by surveillance cameras in public
spaces or events are typically small, occluded, and atypical poses. These faces are arguably the most interesting yet
crucial to detect for further investigation.

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