Dense pedestrian face detection in complex environments

• Published in: Scientific reports 2024-09, Vol.14 (1), p.21460-17, Article 21460
• Main Authors: Gao, Qiang, Ding, Bingru, Jia, Xu, Xie, Yinghong, Han, Xiaowei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 639/705; 639/705/117; Algorithms; Attention task; Dense pedestrian; EfficientNet; Face; Face detection; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; NAS-FPN; RetinaFace; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-72523-8

To address the problem of dense crowd face detection in complex environments, this paper proposes a face detection model named Deep and Compact Face Detection (DCFD), which adopts an improved lightweight EfficientNetV2 network to replace the backbone network of RetinaFace. A large kernel attention mechanism is introduced to address the face detection task more accurately. The backbone network, an improved efficient channel attention (ECA) mechanism, is added to further improve the algorithm performance. The feature fusion module is an improved neural architecture search feature pyramid network (NAS-FPN) that significantly improves the face detection accuracy in different scenes. To balance the training process of positive and negative samples, we use the focus loss function to replace the traditional cross-entropy loss function. In different environments, the DCFD algorithm has shown efficient face detection performance. This algorithm provides not only a feasible and effective solution for solving the problem of face detection in dense groups but also an important basis for improving the accuracy of face detection models in practical applications.