Face detection by aggregating visible components

Pose variations and occlusions are two major challenges for unconstrained face detection. Many approaches have been proposed to handle pose variations and occlusions in face detection, however, few of them addresses the two challenges in a model explicitly and simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel face detection method called Aggregating Visible Components (AVC), which addresses pose variations and occlusions simultaneously in a single framework with low complexity. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) By aggregating visible components which have inherent advantages in occasions of occlusions, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance using only hand-crafted feature; (2) Mapped from meanshape through component-invariant mapping, the proposed component detector is more robust to pose-variations (3) A local to global aggregation strategy that involves region competition helps alleviate false alarms while enhancing localization accuracy.