Face detection and recognition for home service robots with end-to-end deep neural networks

This paper proposes an effective end-to-end face detection and recognition framework based on deep convolutional neural networks for home service robots. We combine the state-of-the-art region proposal based deep detection network with the deep face embedding network into an end-to-end system, so that the detection and recognition networks can share the same deep convolutional layers, enabling significant reduction of computation through sharing convolutional features. The detection network is robust to large occlusion, and scale, pose, and lighting variations. The recognition network does not require explicit face alignment, which enables an effective training strategy to generate a unified network. A practical robot system is also developed based on the proposed framework, where the system automatically asks for a minimum level of human supervision when needed, and no complicated region-level face annotation is required. Experiments are conducted over WIDER and LFW benchmarks, as well as a personalized dataset collected from an office setting, which demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our system.