Archival Faces: Detection of Faces in Digitized Historical Documents

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Vaško, Marek, Herout, Adam, Hradiš, Michal
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Vaško, Marek
Herout, Adam
Hradiš, Michal
author_facet Vaško, Marek
Herout, Adam
Hradiš, Michal
contents When digitizing historical archives, it is necessary to search for the faces of celebrities and ordinary people, especially in newspapers, link them to the surrounding text, and make them searchable. Existing face detectors on datasets of scanned historical documents fail remarkably -- current detection tools only achieve around 24% mAP at 50:90% IoU. This work compensates for this failure by introducing a new manually annotated domain-specific dataset in the style of the popular Wider Face dataset, containing 2.2k new images from digitized historical newspapers from the 19th to 20th century, with 11k new bounding-box annotations and associated facial landmarks. This dataset allows existing detectors to be retrained to bring their results closer to the standard in the field of face detection in the wild. We report several experimental results comparing different families of fine-tuned detectors against publicly available pre-trained face detectors and ablation studies of multiple detector sizes with comprehensive detection and landmark prediction performance results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00558
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Archival Faces: Detection of Faces in Digitized Historical Documents
Vaško, Marek
Herout, Adam
Hradiš, Michal
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
68T45 (Primary) 68T10, 68T07 (Secondary)
I.4.8; I.5.1
When digitizing historical archives, it is necessary to search for the faces of celebrities and ordinary people, especially in newspapers, link them to the surrounding text, and make them searchable. Existing face detectors on datasets of scanned historical documents fail remarkably -- current detection tools only achieve around 24% mAP at 50:90% IoU. This work compensates for this failure by introducing a new manually annotated domain-specific dataset in the style of the popular Wider Face dataset, containing 2.2k new images from digitized historical newspapers from the 19th to 20th century, with 11k new bounding-box annotations and associated facial landmarks. This dataset allows existing detectors to be retrained to bring their results closer to the standard in the field of face detection in the wild. We report several experimental results comparing different families of fine-tuned detectors against publicly available pre-trained face detectors and ablation studies of multiple detector sizes with comprehensive detection and landmark prediction performance results.
title Archival Faces: Detection of Faces in Digitized Historical Documents
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
68T45 (Primary) 68T10, 68T07 (Secondary)
I.4.8; I.5.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00558