Optimally Training a Cascade Classifier

Abstract: Cascade classifiers are widely used in real-time object detection. Different from conventional classifiers that are designed for a low overall classification error rate, a classifier in each node of the cascade is required to achieve an extremely high detection rate and moderate false positive rate. Although there are a few reported methods addressing this requirement in the context of object detection, there is no a principled feature selection method that explicitly takes into account this asymmetric node learning objective. We provide such an algorithm here. We show a special case of the biased minimax probability machine has the same formulation as the linear asymmetric classifier (LAC) of \cite{wu2005linear}. We then design a new boosting algorithm that directly optimizes the cost function of LAC. The resulting totally-corrective boosting algorithm is implemented by the column generation technique in convex optimization. Experimental results on object detection verify the effectiveness of the proposed boosting algorithm as a node classifier in cascade object detection, and show performance better than that of the current state-of-the-art.