Task-Oriented Feature-Fused Network With Multivariate Dataset for Joint Face Analysis

Deep multitask learning for face analysis has received increasing attentions. From literature, most existing methods focus on optimizing a main task by jointly learning several auxiliary tasks. It is challenging to consider the performance of each task in a multitask framework due to the following reasons: 1) different face tasks usually rely on different levels of semantic features; 2) each task has different learning convergence rate, which could affect the whole performance when joint training; and 3) multitask model needs rich label information for efficient training, but existing facial datasets provide limited annotations. To address these issues, we propose a task-oriented feature-fused network (TFN) for simultaneously solving face detection, landmark localization, and attribute analysis. In this network, a task-oriented feature-fused block is designed to learn task-specific feature combinations; then, an alternative multitask training scheme is presented to optimize each task with considering of their different learning capacities. We also present a large-scale face dataset called JFA in support of proposed method, which provides multivariate labels, including face bounding box, 68 facial landmarks, and 3 attribute labels (i.e., apparent age, gender, and ethnicity). The experimental results suggest that the TFN outperforms several multitask models on the JFA dataset. Furthermore, our approach achieves competitive performances on WIDER FACE and 300W dataset, and obtains state-of-the-art results for gender recognition on the MORPH II dataset.