GPU Implementation of Real-Time Biologically Inspired Face Detection using CUDA

In this paper massively parallel real-time face detection based on a visual attention and cortex-like mechanism of cognitive vision system is presented. As a first step, we use saliency map model to select salient face regions and HMAX C1 model to extract features from salient input image and then apply mixture of expert neural network to classify multi-view faces from nonface images. The saliency map model is a complex concept for bottom-up attention selection that includes many processes to find face regions in a visual science. Parallel real-time implementation on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) provides a solution for this kind of computationally intensive image processing. By implementing saliency map and HMAX C1 model on a multi-GPU platform using CUDA programming with memory bandwidth, we achieve good performance compared to recent CPU. Running on NVIDIA Geforce 8800 (GTX) graphics card at resolution 640×480 detection rate of 97% is achieved. In addition, we evaluate our results using a height speed camera with other parallel methods on face detection application.