Novel likelihood estimation technique based on boosting detector

This paper presents novel likelihood estimation to be used for particle filter based object tracking. The likelihood estimation is built upon cascade object detector trained with Gentle AdaBoost (GAB), in order to capture the probability of existence of object. Two strategies are adopted to construct the likelihood functions: probability-intra-stage (PIS) corresponding to real output of each weak classifier in the same stage, and probability-outer-stage (POS) corresponding to the depth reached in the cascade detector. Five kinds of likelihood functions are thus proposed based on the trained GAB detector. Our experiment shows the likelihood functions are able to characterize probabilistically the existence of object accurately, having much higher confidence value in object regions than that in background, and that the integral strategy of PIS and POS is the best choice.