TRFH: towards real-time face detection and head pose estimation

Nowadays, face detection and head pose estimation have a lot of application such as face recognition, aiding in gaze estimation and modeling attention. For these two tasks, it is usually to design two different models. However, the head pose estimation model often depends on the region of interest (ROI) detected in advance, which means that a serial face detector is needed. Even the lightest face detector will slow down the whole forward inference time and cannot achieve real-time performance when detecting the head pose of multiple people. We can see that both face detection and head pose estimation need face features, so a shared face feature map can be used between them. In this paper, a multi-task learning model is proposed that can solve both problems simultaneously. We directly detect the location of the center point of the bounding box of face; at this location, we calculate the size of the bounding box of face and the head attitude. We evaluate our model’s performance on the AFLW. The proposed model has great competitiveness with the multi-stage face attribute analysis model, and our model can achieve real-time performance.