Robust real-time face detection based on cost-sensitive AdaBoost method

This paper presents a method of detecting faces based on Cost-Sensitive AdaBoost (CS-AdaBoost) algorithm. The two main differences between CS-AdaBoost algorithm and the naïve AdaBoost are that (1) unequal initial weights are given to each training sample according to its misclassification cost, and (2) the weights are updated separately for positives and negatives at each boosting step. Due to these two variations, every stage of the face detector trained by CS-AdaBoost algorithm can more effectively focus on face samples than by the naïve AdaBoost to achieve robust and high detection rate with modest false alarm rate, so that the final face detector can yield high detection rates, very low false positive rates, and robust performance. Experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.