Robust Neonatal Face Detection in Real-world Clinical Settings

Abstract: Current face detection algorithms are extremely generalized and can obtain decent accuracy when detecting the adult faces. These approaches are insufficient when handling outlier cases, for example when trying to detect the face of a neonate infant whose face composition and expressions are relatively different than that of the adult. It is furthermore difficult when applied to detect faces in a complicated setting such as the Neonate Intensive Care Unit. By training a state-of-the-art face detection model, You-Only-Look-Once, on a proprietary dataset containing labelled neonate faces in a clinical setting, this work achieves near real time neonate face detection. Our preliminary findings show an accuracy of 68.7%, compared to the off the shelf solution which detected neonate faces with an accuracy of 7.37%. Although further experiments are needed to validate our model, our results are promising and prove the feasibility of detecting neonatal faces in challenging real-world settings. The robust and real-time detection of neonatal faces would benefit wide range of automated systems (e.g., pain recognition and surveillance) who currently suffer from the time and effort due to the necessity of manual annotations. To benefit the research community, we make our trained weights publicly available at github(https://github.com/ja05haus/trained_neonate_face).