M. Reiter and J. Matas. Object detection with varying number of eigenspace projections. In A.K. Jain, S. Venkatesh, and B. C. Lowell, editors, Proceedings of the 14th ICPR, pages 759-761, Los Alamitos, California, August 1998. IEEE Computer Society.
We present a method allowing a significant speed-up of the eigen-detection method (detection based on principle component analysis). We derive a formula for an upper bound on the class-conditional probability (or equivalently a lower bound on the Mahalanobis distance) on which detection is based. Often, the lower bound of Mahalanobis distance (MD) reaches a preset threshold after computation of only a few eigen-projections. In this case the computation of MD can be immediately terminated. Regardless of the precise value of MD, the detection hypothesis (object from class Ω is detected) can be rejected. While provably obtaining results identical to the standard technique, we achieved a two- to three-fold speed-up in face detection experiments on images from the CMU database.