Current state-of-the-art object classification systems are trained using large amounts of hand-labeled images. In this paper, we present an approach that shows how to use unlabeled video sequences, comprising weakly-related object categories towards the target class, to learn better classifiers for tracking and detection. The underlying idea is to exploit the space-time consistency of moving objects to learn classifiers that are robust to local transformations. In particular, we use dense optical flow to find moving objects in videos in order to train part-based random forests that are insensitive to natural transformations. Our method, which is called Video Forests, can be used in two settings: first, labeled training data can be regularized to force the trained classifier to generalize better towards small local transformations. Second, as part of a tracking-by-detection approach, it can be used to train a general codebook solely on pair-wise data that can then be applied to tracking of instances of a priori unknown object categories. In the experimental part, we show on benchmark datasets for both tracking and detection that incorporating unlabeled videos into the learning of visual classifiers leads to improved results.

Online learning has shown to be successful in tracking of previously unknown objects. However, most approaches are limited to a bounding-box representation with fixed aspect ratio. Thus, they provide a less accurate fore- ground/background separation and cannot handle highly non-rigid and articulated objects. This, in turn, increases the amount of noise introduced during online self-training. In this paper, we present a novel tracking-by-detection approach to overcome this limitation based on the generalized Hough-transform. We extend the idea of Hough Forests to the online domain and couple the voting- based detection and back-projection with a rough segmentation based on GrabCut. This significantly reduces the amount of noisy training samples during online learning and thus effectively prevents the tracker from drifting. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our method successfully tracks a variety of previously unknown objects even under heavy non-rigid transformations, partial occlusions, scale changes and rotations. Moreover, we compare our tracker to state-of-the-art methods (both bounding-box- based as well as part-based) and show robust and accurate tracking results on various challenging sequences.

In this paper, we introduce a fully autonomous vehicle classification system that continuously learns from largeamounts of unlabeled data. For that purpose, we proposea novel on-line co-training method based on visual and acoustic information. Our system does not need complicated microphone arrays or video calibration and automatically adapts to specific traffic scenes. These specialized detectors are more accurate and more compact than general classifiers, which allows for light-weight usage in low-cost and portable embedded systems. Hence, we implemented our system on an off-the-shelf embedded platform. In the experimental part, we show that the proposed method is able to cover the desired task and outperforms single-cue systems. Furthermore, our co-training framework minimizes the labeling effort without degrading the overall system performance.

Online boosting is one of the most successful online learning algorithms in computer vision. While many challenging online learning problems are inherently multi-class, online boosting and its variants are only able to solve binary tasks. In this paper, we present Online Multi-Class LPBoost (OMCLP) which is directly applicable to multi-class problems. From a theoretical point of view, our algorithm tries to maximize the multi-class soft-margin of the samples. In order to solve the LP problem in online settings, we perform an efficient variant of online convex programming, which is based on primal-dual gradient descent-ascent update strategies. We conduct an extensive set of experiments over machine learning benchmark datasets, as well as, on Caltech 101 category recognition dataset. We show that our method is able to outperform other online multi-class methods. We also apply our method to tracking where, we present an intuitive way to convert the binary tracking by detection problem to a multi-class problem where background patterns which are similar to the target class, become virtual classes. Applying our novel model, we outperform or achieve the state-of-the-art results on benchmark tracking videos.

Randomized learning methods (i.e., Forests or Ferns) have shown excellent capabilities for various computer vision applications. However, it was shown that the tree structure in Forests can be replaced by even simpler structures, e.g., Random Naive Bayes classifiers, yielding similar performance. The goal of this paper is to benefit from these findings to develop an efficient on-line learner. Based on the principals of on-line Random Forests, we adapt the Random Naive Bayes classifier to the on-line domain. For that purpose, we propose to use on-line histograms as weak learners, which yield much better performance than simple decision stumps. Experimentally we show, that the approach is applicable to incremental learning on machine learning datasets. Additionally, we propose to use an IIR filtering-like forgetting function for the weak learners to enable adaptivity and evaluate our classifier on the task of tracking by detection.