WDR FACE: The First Database for Studying Face Detection in Wide Dynamic Range

Currently, face detection approaches focus on facial information by varying specific parameters including pose, occlusion, lighting, background, race, and gender. These studies only utilized the information obtained from low dynamic range images, however, face detection in wide dynamic range (WDR) scenes has received little attention. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available WDR database for face detection research. To facilitate and support future face detection research in the WDR field, we propose the first WDR database for face detection, called WDR FACE, which contains a total of 398 16-bit megapixel grayscale wide dynamic range images collected from 29 subjects. These WDR images (WDRIs) were taken in eight specific WDR scenes. The dynamic range of 90% images surpasses 60,000:1, and that of 70% images exceeds 65,000:1. Furthermore, we show the effect of different face detection procedures on the WDRIs in our database. This is done with 25 different tone mapping operators and five different face detectors. We provide preliminary experimental results of face detection on this unique WDR database.