Robust Face Detection with Multi-Class Boosting

With the aim to design a general learning framework for detecting faces of various poses or under different lighting conditions, we are motivated to formulate the task as a classification problem over data of multiple classes. Specifically, our approach focuses on a new multi-class boosting algorithm, called MBHboost, and its integration with a cascade structure for effectively performing face detection. There are three main advantages of using MBHboost: 1) each MBH weak learner is derived by sharing a good projection direction such that each class of data has its own decision boundary; 2) the proposed boosting algorithm is established based on an optimal criterion for multi-class classification; and 3) since MBHboost is flexible with respect to the number of classes, it turns out that it is possible to use only one single boosted cascade for the multi-class detection. All these properties give rise to a robust system to detect faces efficiently and accurately.