Acceleration of multi‐task cascaded convolutional networks. Issue 11 (24th July 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ma, Long‐Hua; Fan, Hang‐Yu; Lu, Zhe‐Ming; Tian, Dong
• Is Part Of: IET image processing. Volume 14:Issue 11(2020)
• Page Start: 2435
• Page End: 2441
• Publication Date: 2020-07-24
• Subjects: face recognition -- learning (artificial intelligence) -- object detection -- probability -- convolutional neural nets; convolutional neural network -- human face detection architecture -- cascaded structure -- P‐Net -- computation time -- weight pruning -- channel pruning -- self‐fine‐tuning method -- NMS process -- human face probabilities -- NMS input boxes -- face boxes -- self‐fine‐tuned MTCNN -- multitask cascaded convolutional networks; Image processing -- Periodicals; 621.36705
• DOI: 10.1049/iet-ipr.2019.0141
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1751-9659

Abstract

Abstract : Multi‐task cascaded convolutional neural network (MTCNN) is a human face detection architecture which uses a cascaded structure with three stages (P‐Net, R‐Net and O‐Net). The authors intend to reduce the computation time of the whole process of the MTCNN. They find that the non‐maximum suppression (NMS) processes after the P‐Net occupy over half of the computation time. Therefore, the authors propose a self‐fine‐tuning method which makes the control of computation time for the NMS process easier. Self‐fine‐tuning is a training trick which uses hard samples generated by P‐Net to retrain P‐Net. After self‐fine‐tuning, the distribution of human face probabilities generated by P‐Net is changed, and the tail of distribution becomes thinner. The control of the number of NMS input boxes can be made easier when the distribution has a thinner tail, and choosing a suitable threshold to filter the face boxes will generate less boxes. So the computation time can be reduced. In order to keep the performance of MTCNN, the authors still propose a landmark data set augmentation, which can enhance the performance of the self‐fine‐tuned MTCNN. From the experiments, it is found that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the computation time of MTCNN.