Multi-class ada-boost classification of object poses through visual and infrared image information fusion

This paper presents a novel method for pose classification using fusion of visual and thermal infrared(IR) images. We propose a novel tree structure multi-class classification scheme with visual and IR sub-classifiers. These sub-classifiers are different from the conventional one-against-all or one-against-one strategies, where we handle the multi-class problem directly. We propose to use an accuracy score for the fusion of visual and IR sub-classifiers. In addition, we propose to use the original Haar features plus an extra one, and a multi-threshold weak learner to obtain weak hypothesis. The experimental results on a visual and IR image dataset containing 3018 face images in three poses show that the proposed classifier achieves high classification rate of 99.50% on the test set. Comparisons are made to a fused one-vs-all method, a classifier with visual band only, and a classifier with IR band only. Results provide further support to the proposed method.