Rediscovery of the Effectiveness of Standard Convolution for Lightweight Face Detection
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This paper analyses the design choices of face detection architecture that improve efficiency between computation cost and accuracy. Specifically, we re-examine the effectiveness of the standard convolutional block as a lightweight backbone architecture on face detection. Unlike the current tendency of lightweight architecture design, which heavily utilizes depthwise separable convolution layers, we show that heavily channel-pruned standard convolution layer can achieve better accuracy and inference speed when using a similar parameter size. This observation is supported by the analyses concerning the characteristics of the target data domain, face. Based on our observation, we propose to employ ResNet with a highly reduced channel, which surprisingly allows high efficiency compared to other mobile-friendly networks (e.g., MobileNet-V1,-V2,-V3). From the extensive experiments, we show that the proposed backbone can replace that of the state-of-the-art face detector with a faster inference speed. Also, we further propose a new feature aggregation method maximizing the detection performance. Our proposed detector EResFD obtained 80.4 image inference in on CPU. Code will be available at https://github.com/clovaai/EResFD.
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