Boosting part-sense multi-feature learners toward effective object detection

AdaBoost has been applied to object detection to construct the detectors with high performance of discrimination and generalization by single-feature learner. However, the poor discriminative power of extremely weak single-feature learners limits its application for general object detection. In this paper, we propose a novel comprehensive learner design mechanism toward effective object detection in terms of both discrimination and generalization abilities. Firstly, the part-sense multi-feature learners are designed to linearly combine the multiple local features to improve the descriptive and discriminative capacity of the learner. Secondly, we formulate the feature selection in part-sense multi-feature learner as a weighted LASSO regression. Using Least Angle Regression (LARS) method, our approach can choose features adaptively, efficiently and as few as possible to guarantee generalization performance. Finally, a robust L1-regularized gradient boosting is proposed to integrate our part-sense sparse features learner into an object classifier. Extensive experiments and comparisons on the face dataset and the human dataset show the proposed approach outperforms the traditional single-feature learner and other multi-feature learners in discriminative and generalization abilities. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.