Title
Recurrent Exposure Generation for Low-Light Face Detection
Abstract
Face detection from low-light images is challenging due to limited photons and inevitable noise, which, to make the task even harder, are often spatially unevenly distributed. A natural solution is to borrow the idea from multi-exposure, which captures multiple shots to obtain well-exposed images under challenging conditions. High-quality implementation/approximation of multi-exposure from a single image is however nontrivial. Fortunately, as shown in this paper, neither is such high-quality necessary since our task is face detection rather than image enhancement. Specifically, we propose a novel Recurrent Exposure Generation (REG) module and couple it seamlessly with a Multi-Exposure Detection (MED) module, and thus significantly improve face detection performance by effectively inhibiting non-uniform illumination and noise issues. REG produces progressively and efficiently intermediate images corresponding to various exposure settings, and such pseudo-exposures are then fused by MED to detect faces across different lighting conditions. The proposed method, named REGDet, is the first 'detection-with-enhancement' framework for low-light face detection. It not only encourages rich interaction and feature fusion across different illumination levels, but also enables effective end-to-end learning of the REG component to be better tailored for face detection. Moreover, as clearly shown in our experiments, REG can be flexibly coupled with different face detectors without extra low/normal-light image pairs for training. We tested REGDet on the DARK FACE low-light face benchmark with thorough ablation study, where REGDet outperforms previous state-of-the-arts by a significant margin, with only negligible extra parameters.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TMM.2021.3068840
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Face detection, Faces, Lighting, Detectors, Face recognition, Task analysis, Benchmark testing, Gated recurrent networks, low-light face detection, multi-exposure
Journal
24
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1520-9210
0
0.34
References 
Authors
33
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jinxiu Liang100.34
Jingwen Wang200.34
Yuhui Quan327021.69
Tianyi Chen400.34
Jiaying Liu586083.96
Haibin Ling64531215.76
Yong Xu759537.87