mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

YOLO5Face: Why Reinventing a Face Detector

arXiv 2105.12931 ↗First posted 27 May 2021cs.CVcited by 44

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Abstract (arXiv)

Tremendous progress has been made on face detection in recent years using convolutional neural networks. While many face detectors use designs designated for detecting faces, we treat face detection as a generic object detection task. We implement a face detector based on the YOLOv5 object detector and call it YOLO5Face. We make a few key modifications to the YOLOv5 and optimize it for face detection. These modifications include adding a five-point landmark regression head, using a stem block at the input of the backbone, using smaller-size kernels in the SPP, and adding a P6 output in the PAN block. We design detectors of different model sizes, from an extra-large model to achieve the best performance to a super small model for real-time detection on an embedded or mobile device. Experiment results on the WiderFace dataset show that on VGA images, our face detectors can achieve state-of-the-art performance in almost all the Easy, Medium, and Hard subsets, exceeding the more complex designated face detectors. The code is available at urlhttps://github.com/deepcam-cn/yolov5-face

Key facts. Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 47 of its 62 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 May 2021.

Builds on

47 of 62 references.

References · 47

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2015Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networkscited by 9,617
  3. 2020End-to-End Object Detection with Transformerscited by 7,384
  4. 2017Mask R-CNNcited by 7,259
  5. 2016Densely Connected Convolutional Networkscited by 6,691
  6. 2016Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detectioncited by 5,021
  7. 2015You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 4,829
  8. 2018MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottleneckscited by 4,773
  9. 2015Fast R-CNNcited by 2,930
  10. 2018YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvementcited by 2,652
  11. 2013Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentationcited by 2,160
  12. 2020YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detectioncited by 1,624
35 more
  1. 2016YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Strongercited by 1,429
  2. 2019MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmarkcited by 1,379
  3. 2017Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detectioncited by 1,275
  4. 2017ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devicescited by 1,194
  5. 2019Objects as Pointscited by 1,172
  6. 2018ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Designcited by 1,132
  7. 2019EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detectioncited by 1,018
  8. 2017Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learningcited by 935
  9. 2016Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networkscited by 895
  10. 2018Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentationcited by 796
  11. 2019CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detectioncited by 654
  12. 2019Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regressioncited by 454
  13. 2018Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 430
  14. 2015WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmarkcited by 297
  15. 2021WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognitioncited by 221
  16. 2019RetinaFace: Single-stage Dense Face Localisation in the Wildcited by 164
  17. 2020Partial FC: Training 10 Million Identities on a Single Machinecited by 163
  18. 2017S3FD: Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detectorcited by 142
  19. 2020TResNet: High Performance GPU-Dedicated Architecturecited by 119
  20. 2018DSFD: Dual Shot Face Detectorcited by 115
  21. 2017Wing Loss for Robust Facial Landmark Localisation with Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 108
  22. 2021Sample and Computation Redistribution for Efficient Face Detectioncited by 86
  23. 2018PyramidBox: A Context-assisted Single Shot Face Detectorcited by 57
  24. 2018Pelee: A Real-Time Object Detection System on Mobile Devicescited by 56
  25. 2017FaceBoxes: A CPU Real-time Face Detector with High Accuracycited by 44
  26. 2020TinaFace: Strong but Simple Baseline for Face Detectioncited by 30
  27. 2018Selective Refinement Network for High Performance Face Detectioncited by 21
  28. 2019RefineFace: Refinement Neural Network for High Performance Face Detectioncited by 21
  29. 2019PyramidBox++: High Performance Detector for Finding Tiny Facecited by 13
  30. 2020Deep Multi-task Learning for Facial Expression Recognition and Synthesis Based on Selective Feature Sharingcited by 7
  31. 2019Robust and High Performance Face Detectorcited by 6
  32. 2019Improved Selective Refinement Network for Face Detectioncited by 5
  33. 2018Learning Better Features for Face Detection with Feature Fusion and Segmentation Supervisioncited by 4
  34. 2019HAMBox: Delving into Online High-quality Anchors Mining for Detecting Outer Facescited by 4
  35. 2020MaskFace: multi-task face and landmark detectorcited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 5; 2023: 15; 2024: 10; 2025: 4; 2026: 7.

44 papers.

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  1. 2023Survey on Deep Face Restoration: From Non-blind to Blind and Beyondcited by 18
  2. 2024FactorizePhys: Matrix Factorization for Multidimensional Attention in Remote Physiological Sensingcited by 13
  3. 2021Improved YOLOv5 network for real-time multi-scale traffic sign detectioncited by 11
  4. 2023Lip2Vec: Efficient and Robust Visual Speech Recognition via Latent-to-Latent Visual to Audio Representation Mappingcited by 10
  5. 2023Racial Bias within Face Recognition: A Surveycited by 9
  6. 2025Advanced Sign Language Video Generation with Compressed and Quantized Multi-Condition Tokenizationcited by 9
  7. 2023Do VSR Models Generalize Beyond LRS3?cited by 8
  8. 2024Dual-Branch Network for Portrait Image Quality Assessmentcited by 8
  9. 2024YOLOv1 to YOLOv10: The fastest and most accurate real-time object detection systemscited by 6
  10. 2022Automatic Cattle Identification using YOLOv5 and Mosaic Augmentation: A Comparative Analysiscited by 5
  11. 2023Neonatal Face and Facial Landmark Detection from Video Recordingscited by 5
  12. 2022Vision Transformers and YoloV5 based Driver Drowsiness Detection Frameworkcited by 4
32 more
  1. 2024Hiding Faces in Plain Sight: Defending DeepFakes by Disrupting Face Detectioncited by 4
  2. 2022Are Commercial Face Detection Models as Biased as Academic Models?cited by 3
  3. 2023EfficientFace: An Efficient Deep Network with Feature Enhancement for Accurate Face Detectioncited by 3
  4. 2023FisheyePP4AV: A privacy-preserving method for autonomous vehicles on fisheye camera imagescited by 3
  5. 2021Balanced Masked and Standard Face Recognitioncited by 2
  6. 2023Filter-Pruning of Lightweight Face Detectors Using a Geometric Median Criterioncited by 2
  7. 2024ViSpeR: Multilingual Audio-Visual Speech Recognitioncited by 2
  8. 2024LenslessFace: An End-to-End Optimized Lensless System for Privacy-Preserving Face Verificationcited by 2
  9. 2024FDLite: A Single Stage Lightweight Face Detector Networkcited by 2
  10. 2024Leveraging Content and Context Cues for Low-Light Image Enhancementcited by 2
  11. 2025B-FPGM: Lightweight Face Detection via Bayesian-Optimized Soft FPGM Pruningcited by 2
  12. 2023Breast Cancer Segmentation using Attention-based Convolutional Network and Explainable AIcited by 1
  13. 2023A Real-Time Multi-Task Learning System for Joint Detection of Face, Facial Landmark and Head Posecited by 1
  14. 2025Could AI Trace and Explain the Origins of AI-Generated Images and Text?cited by 1
  15. 2026AlphaFace: High Fidelity and Real-time Face Swapper Robust to Facial Posecited by 1
  16. 2021Bounding-box deep calibration for high performance face detectioncited by 0
  17. 2022Real-Time Face Recognition Systemcited by 0
  18. 2022Robot Person Following in Uniform Crowd Environmentcited by 0
  19. 2023Robust Human Identity Anonymization using Pose Estimationcited by 0
  20. 2023HFLIC: Human Friendly Perceptual Learned Image Compression with Reinforced Transformcited by 0
  21. 2023EfficientSRFace: An Efficient Network with Super-Resolution Enhancement for Accurate Face Detectioncited by 0
  22. 2023Skipped Feature Pyramid Network with Grid Anchor for Object Detectioncited by 0
  23. 2023Quality-Aware Prototype Memory for Face Representation Learningcited by 0
  24. 2024Two Deep Learning Solutions for Automatic Blurring of Faces in Videoscited by 0
  25. 2024Emotion Recognition with Facial Attention and Objective Activation Functionscited by 0
  26. 2025Archival Faces: Detection of Faces in Digitized Historical Documentscited by 0
  27. 2026Thermal Imaging for Contactless Cardiorespiratory and Sudomotor Response Monitoringcited by 0
  28. 2026Gaze4HRI: Zero-shot Benchmarking Gaze Estimation Neural-Networks for Human-Robot Interactioncited by 0
  29. 2026Pre-training Enables Extraordinary All-optical Image Denoisingcited by 0
  30. 2026Perceived face similarity reflects inverse-generative and naturalistic discriminative objectivescited by 0
  31. 2026WIDER-FAIR: An Annotated Version of the WIDER-FACE Dataset for Fairness Evaluationcited by 0
  32. 2026Beyond Contact Sensors: Deep learning with Pseudo-Labeling for remote Photoplethysmographycited by 0