Localize heavily occluded human faces via deep segmentation

Localizing heavily occluded human faces is a challenging problem in facial detection. Previous methods mainly employ sliding windows by determining whether windows include human faces. In this paper, we provide a novel segmentation-based perspective for heavily occluded face localization with deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Our model takes an image as input without complicated pre-processing. After several convolutional layers, fully-connected layers and a softmax classifier, we can predict the labels of all pixels in an image, which is the key to localize heavily occluded human faces. Finally, we search a minimal rectangle to localize the human face. Our detector needs neither complex pre-processing nor the time-consuming sliding window. Besides, we use a single model to localize faces to further alleviate computational complexity. Experimental results show that our proposed method is a very effective way to localize heavily occluded human face.