A cascade framework for masked face detection

Accurately and efficiently detecting masked faces is increasingly meaningful, since it can be applied on tracking and identifying criminals or terrorists. As a unique face detection task, masked face detection is much more difficult because of extreme occlusions which leads to the loss of face details. Besides, there is almost no existing large-scale accurately labeled masked face dataset, which increase the difficulty of masked face detection. The CNN-based deep learning algorithms has made great breakthroughs in many computer vision areas including face detection. In this paper, we propose a new CNN-based cascade framework, which consists of three carefully designed convolutional neural networks to detect masked faces. Besides, because of the shortage of masked face training samples, we propose a new dataset called "MASKED FACE dataset" to fine-tune our CNN models. We evaluate our proposed masked face detection algorithm on the MASKED FACE testing set, and it achieves satisfactory performance.