# EResFD: Rediscovery of the Effectiveness of Standard Convolution for Lightweight Face Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.01209 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01209/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [RetinaFace: Single-stage Dense Face Localisation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00641/) (2019)
- [Revisiting ResNets: Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07579/) (2021)
- [S3FD: Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05237/) (2017)
- [DSFD: Dual Shot Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10220/) (2018)
- [Shift: A Zero FLOP, Zero Parameter Alternative to Spatial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08141/) (2017)
- [Sample and Computation Redistribution for Efficient Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04714/) (2021)
- [MCUNetV2: Memory-Efficient Patch-based Inference for Tiny Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15352/) (2021)
- [BlazeFace: Sub-millisecond Neural Face Detection on Mobile GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05047/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [ProxyDet: Synthesizing Proxy Novel Classes via Classwise Mixup for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07266/) (2023)
- [FDLite: A Single Stage Lightweight Face Detector Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19107/) (2024)
- [Filter-Pruning of Lightweight Face Detectors Using a Geometric Median Criterion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16613/) (2023)
- [B-FPGM: Lightweight Face Detection via Bayesian-Optimized Soft FPGM Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16917/) (2025)
- [Archival Faces: Detection of Faces in Digitized Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00558/) (2025)
- [Weave Mamba Fusion: Global Cross-Scale Interaction for Lightweight Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05865/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper analyzes the design choices of face detection architecture that improve efficiency of computation cost and accuracy. Specifically, we re-examine the effectiveness of the standard convolutional block as a lightweight backbone architecture for 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 layers 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, faces. 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., MobileNetV1, 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 to maximize the detection performance. Our proposed detector EResFD obtained 80.4% mAP on WIDER FACE Hard subset which only takes 37.7 ms for VGA image inference on CPU. Code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/EResFD.