In this paper we address the problem of using boosting (e.g. AdaBoost [7]) to classify a target class with significant intra-class variation against a large background class. This situation occurs for example when we want to recognize a visual object class against all other image patches. The boosting algorithm produces a strong classifier, which is a linear combination of weak classifiers. We observe that we often have sets of weak classifiers that individually fire on many examples of the target class but never fire together on those examples (i.e. their outputs are anti-correlated on the target class). Motivated by this observation we suggest a family of derived weak classifiers, termed gated classifiers, that suppress such combinations of weak classifiers. Gated classifiers can be used on top of any original weak learner. We run experiments on two popular datasets, showing that our method reduces the required number of weak classifiers by almost an order of magnitude, which in turn yields faster detectors. We experiment on synthetic data showing that gated classifiers enables more complex distributions to be represented. We hope that gated classifiers will extend the usefulness of boosted classifier cascades [29].

In this paper we introduce a new kind of feature - the multi-local feature, so named as each one is a collection of local features, such as oriented edgels, in a very specific spatial arrangement. A multi-local feature has the ability to capture underlying constant shape properties of exemplars from an object class. Thus it is particularly suited to representing and detecting visual classes that lack distinctive local structures and are mainly defined by their global shape. We present algorithms to automatically learn an ensemble of these features to represent an object class from weakly labelled training images of that class, as well as procedures to detect these features efficiently in novel images. The power of multi-local features is demonstrated by using the ensemble in a simple voting scheme to perform object category detection on a standard database. Despite its simplicity, this scheme yields detection rates matching state-of-the-art object detection systems.

Images without alternative text are a barrier to equal web access for blind users. To illustrate the problem, we conducted a series of studies that conclusively show that a large fraction of significant images have no alternative text. To ameliorate this problem, we introduce WebInSight, a system that automatically creates and inserts alternative text into web pages on-the-fly. To formulate alternative text for images, we present three labeling modules based on web context analysis, enhanced optical character recognition (OCR) and human labeling. The system caches alternative text in a local database and can add new labels seamlessly after a web page is downloaded, resulting in minimal impact to the browsing experience.