Boosting Separability in Semisupervised Learning for Object Classification

Boosting algorithms, especially AdaBoost, have attracted great attention in computer vision. In the early version of boosting algorithms, the weak classifier selection and the strong classifier learning are linked together. It has been demonstrated that decoupling of these two processes can provide more flexibility for training a better classifier. In these studies, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) has been adopted to select weak classifiers independently based on class separability rather than a training error that occurs normally in AdaBoost. It is observed that LDA is successful only if a large number of labeled training samples is available. However, a large-scale labeled training set is not always available in many computer vision applications such as object classification. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes semisupervised subspace learning combined with a boosting framework for object classification, through which unlabeled data can participate in the boosting training to compensate for the lack of enough labeled data. With the proposed framework, this paper develops three various approaches that utilize unlabeled data in different ways. According to the experiments on several public image data sets, the proposed methods achieve superior performance over AdaBoost and existing semisupervised algorithms.