Discriminative feature co-occurrence selection for object detection

This paper describes an object detection framework that learns the discriminative co-occurrence of multiple features. Feature co-occurrences are automatically found by Sequential Forward Selection at each stage of the boosting process. The selected feature co-occurrences are capable of extracting structural similarities of target objects leading to better performance. The proposed method is a generalization of the framework proposed by Viola and Jones, where each weak classifier depends only on a single feature. Experimental results obtained using four object detectors, for finding faces and three different hand gestures, respectively, show that detectors trained with the proposed algorithm yield consistently higher detection rates than those based on their framework while using the same number of features.