End-to-end Spatial Attention Network with Feature Mimicking for Head Detection

Human head detection is a widely used task and suitable for identifying persons in practical applications. Although existing methods have achieved significant progress, the problems of false alarm and miss detection are still challenging, which arise from weak classification power of detector in the face of variability in occlusion, illumination, etc. In this paper, we present an effective end-to-end head detector called Spatial Attention Network with feature Mimicking(SANM) that can obtain better feature and enhanced classification power, through attention mechanism and a feature mimic method. The spatial-wise attention is extracted from several levels of feature and supervised by the bounding-box annotated heat map. The attention improves the quality of the features in the head and opposite area. To further improve the classification ability, we utilize the feature mimicking method to drive network learning the feature refined by a deep cascading classifier. Compared with the baseline model, our method achieves better performance and produces leading results on head detection benchmarks.