Effective Face Detector Based on YOLOv5 and Superresolution Reconstruction

Abstract

The application of face detection and recognition technology in security monitoring systems has made a huge contribution to public security. Face detection is an essential first step in many face analysis systems. In complex scenes, the accuracy of face detection would be limited because of the missing and false detection of small faces, due to image quality, face scale, light, and other factors. In this paper, a two-level face detection model called SR-YOLOv5 is proposed to address some problems of dense small faces in actual scenarios. The research first optimized the backbone and loss function of YOLOv5, which is aimed at achieving better performance in terms of mean average precision (mAP) and speed. Then, to improve face detection in blurred scenes or low-resolution situations, we integrated image superresolution technology on the detection head. In addition, some representative deep-learning algorithm based on face detection is discussed by grouping them into a few major categories, and the popular face detection benchmarks are enumerated in detail. Finally, the wider face dataset is used to train and test the SR-YOLOv5 model. Compared with multitask convolutional neural network (MTCNN), Contextual Multi-Scale Region-based CNN (CMS-RCNN), Finding Tiny Faces (HR), Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector (S3FD), and TinaFace algorithms, it is verified that the proposed model has higher detection precision, which is 0.7%, 0.6%, and 2.9% higher than the top one. SR-YOLOv5 can effectively use face information to accurately detect hard-to-detect face targets in complex scenes.