WDR FACE: The First Database for Studying Face Detection in Wide Dynamic Range

TL;DR

This paper introduces WDR FACE, the first publicly available database of wide dynamic range images for face detection, enabling research in challenging lighting conditions and demonstrating the impact of tone mapping and detection methods.

Contribution

The paper presents the creation of the first WDR face detection database, WDR FACE, with 398 high dynamic range images and initial experimental analysis.

Findings

High dynamic range images with over 65,000:1 contrast ratio.

Different tone mapping operators significantly affect detection performance.

Preliminary results show challenges and potential in WDR face detection.

Abstract

Currently, face detection approaches focus on facial information by varying specific parameters including pose, occlusion, lighting, background, race, and gender. These studies only utilized the information obtained from low dynamic range images, however, face detection in wide dynamic range (WDR) scenes has received little attention. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available WDR database for face detection research. To facilitate and support future face detection research in the WDR field, we propose the first WDR database for face detection, called WDR FACE, which contains a total of 398 16-bit megapixel grayscale wide dynamic range images collected from 29 subjects. These WDR images (WDRIs) were taken in eight specific WDR scenes. The dynamic range of 90% images surpasses 60,000:1, and that of 70% images exceeds 65,000:1. Furthermore, we show the effect of different face detection procedures on the WDRIs in our database. This is done with 25 different tone mapping operators and five different face detectors. We provide preliminary experimental results of face detection on this unique WDR database.