Face detection is the basic step in video face analysis and has been studied for many years. However, achieving real-time performance on computation-resource-limited embedded devices still remains an open challenge. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a face detector, EagleEye, which shows a good trade-off between high accuracy and fast speed on the popular embedded device with low computation power (e.g., the Raspberry Pi 3b+). The EagleEye is designed to have low floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) as well as enough capacity, and its accuracy is further improved without adding too much FLOPS. Specifically, we design five strategies for building efficient face detectors with a good balance of accuracy and running speed. The first two strategies help to build a detector with low computation complexity and enough capacity. We use convolution factorization to change traditional convolutions into more sparse depth-wise convolutions to save computation costs and we use successive downsampling convolutions at the beginning of the face detection network. The latter three strategies significantly improve the accuracy of the light-weight detector without adding too much computation costs. We design an efficient context module to utilize context information to benefit the face detection. We also adopt information preserving activation function to increase the network capacity. Finally, we use focal loss to further improve the accuracy by handling the class imbalance problem better. Experiments show that the EagleEye outperforms the other face detectors with the same order of computation costs, on both runtime efficiency and accuracy.
Up-to-date High-Definition (HD) maps are essential for self-driving cars. To achieve constantly updated HD maps, we present a deep neural network (DNN), Diff-Net, to detect changes in them. Compared to traditional methods based on object detectors, the essential design in our work is a parallel feature difference calculation structure that infers map changes by comparing features extracted from the camera and rasterized images. To generate these rasterized images, we project map elements onto images in the camera view, yielding meaningful map representations that can be consumed by a DNN accordingly. As we formulate the change detection task as an object detection problem, we leverage the anchor-based structure that predicts bounding boxes with different change status categories. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first end-to-end network that tackles the high-definition map change detection task, yielding a single stage solution. Furthermore, rather than relying on single frame input, we introduce a spatio-temporal fusion module that fuses features from history frames into the current, thus improving the overall performance. Finally, we comprehensively validate our method's effectiveness using freshly collected datasets. Results demonstrate that our Diff-Net achieves better performance than the baseline methods and is ready to be integrated into a map production pipeline maintaining an up-to-date HD map.