Locally Assembled Binary (LAB) feature with feature-centric cascade for fast and accurate face detection

In this paper, we describe a novel type of feature for fast and accurate face detection. The feature is called Locally Assembled Binary (LAB) Haar feature. LAB feature is basically inspired by the success of Haar feature and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) for face detection, but it is far beyond a simple combination. In our method, Haar features are modified to keep only the ordinal relationship (named by binary Haar feature) rather than the difference between the accumulated intensities. Several neighboring binary Haar features are then assembled to capture their co-occurrence with similar idea to LBP. We show that the feature is more efficient than Haar feature and LBP both in discriminating power and computational cost. Furthermore, a novel efficient detection method called feature-centric cascade is proposed to build an efficient detector, which is developed from the feature-centric method. Experimental results on the CMU+MIT frontal face test set and CMU profile test set show that the proposed method can achieve very good results and amazing detection speed.