A fast and accurate face detector based on neural networks

Detecting faces in images with complex backgrounds is a difficult task. Our approach, which obtains state of the art results, is based on a neural network model: the constrained generative model (CGM). Generative, since the goal of the learning process is to evaluate the probability that the model has generated the input data, and constrained since some counter-examples are used to increase the quality of the estimation performed by the model. To detect side view faces and to decrease the number of false alarms, a conditional mixture of networks is used. To decrease the computational time cost, a fast search algorithm is proposed. The level of performance reached, in terms of detection accuracy and processing time, allows us to apply this detector to a real world application: the indexing of images and videos.