[DATASET]

To use the WIDER Face dataset you need to download it and extract to the data/WIDERFace folder. Annotation in the VOC format can be found in this repo. You should move the annotation files from WIDER_train_annotations and WIDER_val_annotations folders to the Annotation folders inside the corresponding directories WIDER_train and WIDER_val. Also annotation lists val.txt and train.txt should be copied to data/WIDERFace from WIDER_train_annotations and WIDER_val_annotations. The directory should be like this:

mmdetection
├── mmdet
├── tools
├── configs
├── data
│   ├── WIDERFace
│   │   ├── WIDER_train
│   |   │   ├──0--Parade
│   |   │   ├── ...
│   |   │   ├── Annotations
│   │   ├── WIDER_val
│   |   │   ├──0--Parade
│   |   │   ├── ...
│   |   │   ├── Annotations
│   │   ├── val.txt
│   │   ├── train.txt

After that you can train the SSD300 on WIDER by launching training with the ssd300_wider_face.py config or create your own config based on the presented one.

@inproceedings{yang2016wider,
   Author = {Yang, Shuo and Luo, Ping and Loy, Chen Change and Tang, Xiaoou},
   Booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
   Title = {WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark},
   Year = {2016}
}