FACE DETECTION USING SMALL-SCALE CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORK (CNN) MODULES FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Embodiments described herein provide various examples of a face detection system, based on using a small-scale hardware convolutional neutral network (CNN) module configured into a multi-task cascaded CNN. In some embodiments, a subimage-based CNN system can be configured to be equivalent to a large-scale CNN that processes the entire input image without partitioning such that the output of the subimage-based CNN system can be exactly identical to the output of the large-scale CNN. Based on this observation, some embodiments of this patent disclosure make use of the subimage-based CNN system and technique on one or more stages of a cascaded CNN or a multitask cascaded CNN (MTCNN) so that a larger input image to a given stage of the cascaded CNN or the MTCNN can be partitioned into a set of subimages of a smaller size. As a result, each stage of the cascaded CNN or the MTCNN can use the same small-scale hardware CNN module that is associated with a maximum input image size constraint.