Efficient Face Detection with Audio-Based Region Proposals

Robot vision often involves a large computational load due to large images to process in a short amount of time. Existing solutions often involve reducing image quality which can negatively impact processing. Another approach is to generate regions of interest with expensive vision algorithms. In this paper, we evaluate how audio can be used to generate regions of interest in optical images. To achieve this, we propose a unique attention mechanism to localize speech sources and evaluate its impact on a face detection algorithm. Our results show that the attention mechanism reduces the computational load. The proposed pipeline is flexible and can be easily adapted for human-robot interactions, robot surveillance, video-conferences or smart glasses.