An image acquisition device having a wide field of view includes a lens and image sensor configured to capture an original wide field of view (WFoV) image with a field of view of more than 90°. The device has an object detection engine that includes one or more cascades of object classifiers, e.g., face classifiers. A WFoV correction engine may apply rectilinear and/or cylindrical projections to pixels of the WFoV image, and/or non-linear, rectilinear and/or cylindrical lens elements or lens portions serve to prevent and/or correct distortion within the original WFoV image. One or more objects located within the original and/or distortion-corrected WFoV image is/are detectable by the object detection engine upon application of the one or more cascades of object classifiers.