How to choose the cascade file for face detection?

Question

I am a freshman for face detection. These days I try to compile the OpenCV2.1 code for face detection. I found that there are about 4 cascade files for front face detection, whi

Answer 1

It depends on your use case. If you prefer high precision or prefer high recall.

I did a comparison test of face detection for haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml and haarcascade_frontalface_alt_tree.xml, with the same parameters for detectMultiScale function, and only keep the max rectangle that detectMultiScale returns.

On my test data, I found haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml has higher recall (side effect is, more false positives), and haarcascade_frontalface_alt_tree.xml has higher precision (side effect is, detected less number of faces)

You many try with similar test on your data, and choose the one that best suits your purpose