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.