  Currently, face detection approaches focus on facial information by varying
specific parameters including pose, occlusion, lighting, background, race, and
gender. These studies only utilized the information obtained from low dynamic
range images, however, face detection in wide dynamic range (WDR) scenes has
received little attention. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available WDR
database for face detection research. To facilitate and support future face
detection research in the WDR field, we propose the first WDR database for face
detection, called WDR FACE, which contains a total of 398 16-bit megapixel
grayscale wide dynamic range images collected from 29 subjects. These WDR
images (WDRIs) were taken in eight specific WDR scenes. The dynamic range of
90% images surpasses 60,000:1, and that of 70% images exceeds 65,000:1.
Furthermore, we show the effect of different face detection procedures on the
WDRIs in our database. This is done with 25 different tone mapping operators
and five different face detectors. We provide preliminary experimental results
of face detection on this unique WDR database.
