A Reconfigurable Architecture for Rotation Invariant Multi-View Face Detection Based on a Novel Two-Stage Boosting Method

We present a reconfigurable architecture model for rotation invariant multi-view face detection based on a novel two-stage boosting method. A tree-structured detector hierarchy is designed to organize multiple detector nodes identifying pose ranges of faces. We propose a boosting algorithm for training the detector nodes. The strong classifier in each detector node is composed of multiple novelly designed two-stage weak classifiers. With a shared output space of multicomponents vector, each detector node deals with the multidimensional binary classification problems. The design of the hardware architecture which fully exploits the spatial and temporal parallelism is introduced in detail. We also study the reconfiguration of the architecture for finding an appropriate tradeoff among the hardware implementation cost, the detection accuracy, and speed. Experiments on FPGA show that high accuracy and marvelous speed are achieved compared with previous related works. The execution time speedups range from 14.68 to 20.86 for images with size of 160×120 up to 800×600 when our FPGA design (98 MHz) is compared with software solution on PC (Pentium 4 2.8 GHz).