Sample and Computation Redistribution for Efficient Face Detection

Although tremendous strides have been made in uncontrolled face detection, accurate face detection with a low computation cost remains an open challenge. In this paper, we point out that computation distribution and scale augmentation are the keys to detecting small faces from low-resolution images. Motivated by these observations, we introduce two simple but effective methods: (1) Computation Redistribution (CR), which reallocates the computation between the backbone, neck and head of the model; and (2) Sample Redistribution (SR), which augments training samples for the most needed stages. The proposed Sample and Computation Redistribution for Face Detection (SCRFD) is implemented by a random search in a meticulously designed search space. Extensive experiments conducted on WIDER FACE demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-off for the proposed SCRFD family across a wide range of compute regimes. In particular, SCRFD-34GF outperforms the best competitor, TinaFace, by $4.78\%$ (AP at hard set) while being more than 3$\times$ faster on GPUs with VGA-resolution images. Code is available at: https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/detection/scrfd.