Cluster Boosted Tree Classifier for Multi-View, Multi-Pose Object Detection

Detection of object of a known class is a fundamental problem of computer vision. The appearance of objects can change greatly due to illumination, view point, and articulation. For object classes with large intra-class variation, some divide-and-conquer strategy is necessary. Tree structured classifier models have been used for multi-view multi- pose object detection in previous work. This paper proposes a boosting based learning method, called Cluster Boosted Tree (CBT), to automatically construct tree structured object detectors. Instead of using predefined intra-class sub- categorization based on domain knowledge, we divide the sample space by unsupervised clustering based on discriminative image features selected by boosting algorithm. The sub-categorization information of the leaf nodes is sent back to refine their ancestors' classification functions. We compare our approach with previous related methods on several public data sets. The results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.