# Evaluation of Human and Machine Face Detection using a Novel Distinctive Human Appearance Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [Additive Margin Softmax for Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05599/) (2018)
- [Deep Face Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06655/) (2018)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [Mitigating Bias in Algorithmic Hiring: Evaluating Claims and Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09208/) (2019)
- [RetinaFace: Single-stage Dense Face Localisation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00641/) (2019)
- [REPAIR: Removing Representation Bias by Dataset Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07911/) (2019)
- [Towards Fairer Datasets: Filtering and Balancing the Distribution of the People Subtree in the ImageNet Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07726/) (2019)
- [S3FD: Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05237/) (2017)
- [DeepPrivacy: A Generative Adversarial Network for Face Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04538/) (2019)
- [HyperFace: A Deep Multi-task Learning Framework for Face Detection, Landmark Localization, Pose Estimation, and Gender Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01249/) (2016)
- [A Deeper Look at Dataset Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.01257/) (2015)
- [A Comprehensive Study on Face Recognition Biases Beyond Demographics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01592/) (2021)
- [Face Recognition: Too Bias, or Not Too Bias?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06483/) (2020)
- [Diversity in Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10436/) (2019)
- [Bias Mitigation Post-processing for Individual and Group Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06135/) (2018)
- [The Devil of Face Recognition is in the Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11649/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Exploring Public Opinion on Responsible AI Through The Lens of Cultural Consensus Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00029/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face detection is a long-standing challenge in the field of computer vision, with the ultimate goal being to accurately localize human faces in an unconstrained environment. There are significant technical hurdles in making these systems accurate due to confounding factors related to pose, image resolution, illumination, occlusion, and viewpoint [44]. That being said, with recent developments in machine learning, face-detection systems have achieved extraordinary accuracy, largely built on data-driven deep-learning models [70]. Though encouraging, a critical aspect that limits face-detection performance and social responsibility of deployed systems is the inherent diversity of human appearance. Every human appearance reflects something unique about a person, including their heritage, identity, experiences, and visible manifestations of self-expression. However, there are questions about how well face-detection systems perform when faced with varying face size and shape, skin color, body modification, and body ornamentation. Towards this goal, we collected the Distinctive Human Appearance dataset, an image set that represents appearances with low frequency and that tend to be undersampled in face datasets. Then, we evaluated current state-of-the-art face-detection models in their ability to detect faces in these images. The evaluation results show that face-detection algorithms do not generalize well to these diverse appearances. Evaluating and characterizing the state of current face-detection models will accelerate research and development towards creating fairer and more accurate face-detection systems.