Depth-Copy-Paste: Multimodal and Depth-Aware Compositing for Robust Face Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces Depth Copy Paste, a depth-aware data augmentation method that creates realistic face detection training samples by intelligently combining foregrounds and backgrounds based on semantic, visual, and depth coherence, improving detection robustness.

Contribution

It presents a novel multimodal augmentation framework that integrates semantic assessment, precise segmentation, and depth-guided placement to generate more realistic training data for face detection.

Findings

Enhanced face detection accuracy with augmented data

More diverse and realistic training samples generated

Significant improvements over traditional augmentation methods

Abstract

Data augmentation is crucial for improving the robustness of face detection systems, especially under challenging conditions such as occlusion, illumination variation, and complex environments. Traditional copy paste augmentation often produces unrealistic composites due to inaccurate foreground extraction, inconsistent scene geometry, and mismatched background semantics. To address these limitations, we propose Depth Copy Paste, a multimodal and depth aware augmentation framework that generates diverse and physically consistent face detection training samples by copying full body person instances and pasting them into semantically compatible scenes. Our approach first employs BLIP and CLIP to jointly assess semantic and visual coherence, enabling automatic retrieval of the most suitable background images for the given foreground person. To ensure high quality foreground masks that preserve facial details, we integrate SAM3 for precise segmentation and Depth-Anything to extract only the non occluded visible person regions, preventing corrupted facial textures from being used in augmentation. For geometric realism, we introduce a depth guided sliding window placement mechanism that searches over the background depth map to identify paste locations with optimal depth continuity and scale alignment. The resulting composites exhibit natural depth relationships and improved visual plausibility. Extensive experiments show that Depth Copy Paste provides more diverse and realistic training data, leading to significant performance improvements in downstream face detection tasks compared with traditional copy paste and depth free augmentation methods.