Mutual Boosting for Contextual Inference

Mutual Boosting is a method aimed at incorporating contextual information to augment object detection. When multiple detectors of objects and parts are trained in parallel using AdaBoost [1], object detectors might use the remaining intermediate detectors to enrich the weak learner set. This method generalizes the efficient features suggested by Viola and Jones [2] thus enabling information inference between parts and objects in a compositional hierarchy. In our experiments eye-, nose-, mouth- and face detectors are trained using the Mutual Boosting framework. Results show that the method outperforms applications overlooking contextual information. We suggest that achieving contextual integration is a step toward human-like detection capabilities.