A Real-Time Multi-Task Single Shot Face Detector

Face, fiducial detection, and 3D head pose estimation are important face preprocessing modules for face recognition which are usually performed separately and loosely coupled. In this paper, we propose a unifying framework to simultaneously detect face, fiducial points, and head pose in real-time. In addition, since no single dataset contains all the required and best annotations, we develop a progressive training strategy to overcome the annotation discrepancy across different datasets. Extensive experiments on face detection, fiducial detection, and pose estimation benchmarks demonstrate the proposed approach can achieve comparable performance to a state-of-the-art system [1] but runs 60 times faster. (i.e., 20 frames per second)