Recognition using hybrid classifiers

A canonical problem in computer vision is category recognition (e.g., find all instances of human faces, cars etc., in an image). Typically, the input for training a binary classifier is a relatively small sample of positive examples, and a huge sample of negative examples, which can be very diverse, consisting of images from a large number of categories. The difficulty of the problem sharply increases with the dimension and size of the negative example set. We propose to alleviate this problem by applying a 'hybrid' classifier, which replaces the negative samples by a prior, and then finds a hyperplane which separates the positive samples from this prior. The method is extended to kernel space and to an ensemble-based approach. The resulting binary classifiers achieve an identical or better classification rate than SVM, while requiring far smaller memory and lower computational complexity to train and apply.