# Depth-Copy-Paste: Multimodal and Depth-Aware Compositing for Robust Face Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11683 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11683/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [Revisiting Single Image Depth Estimation: Toward Higher Resolution Maps with Accurate Object Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08673/) (2018)
- [DSFD: Dual Shot Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10220/) (2018)
- [DCFace: Synthetic Face Generation with Dual Condition Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07060/) (2023)
- [BlazeFace: Sub-millisecond Neural Face Detection on Mobile GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05047/) (2019)
- [PyramidBox: A Context-assisted Single Shot Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07737/) (2018)
- [FaceBoxes: A CPU Real-time Face Detector with High Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05234/) (2017)
- [Deformable Part Models are Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5403/) (2014)
- [SynRailObs: A Synthetic Dataset for Obstacle Detection in Railway Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10784/) (2025)
- [Enrich the content of the image Using Context-Aware Copy Paste](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08151/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data augmentation is crucial for improving the robustness of face detection systems, especially under challenging conditions such as occlusion, illumination variation, and complex environments. Traditional copy paste augmentation often produces unrealistic composites due to inaccurate foreground extraction, inconsistent scene geometry, and mismatched background semantics. To address these limitations, we propose Depth Copy Paste, a multimodal and depth aware augmentation framework that generates diverse and physically consistent face detection training samples by copying full body person instances and pasting them into semantically compatible scenes. Our approach first employs BLIP and CLIP to jointly assess semantic and visual coherence, enabling automatic retrieval of the most suitable background images for the given foreground person. To ensure high quality foreground masks that preserve facial details, we integrate SAM3 for precise segmentation and Depth-Anything to extract only the non occluded visible person regions, preventing corrupted facial textures from being used in augmentation. For geometric realism, we introduce a depth guided sliding window placement mechanism that searches over the background depth map to identify paste locations with optimal depth continuity and scale alignment. The resulting composites exhibit natural depth relationships and improved visual plausibility. Extensive experiments show that Depth Copy Paste provides more diverse and realistic training data, leading to significant performance improvements in downstream face detection tasks compared with traditional copy paste and depth free augmentation methods.