Building a classification cascade for visual identification from one example

Object identification (OID) is specialized recognition where the category is known (e.g. cars) and the algorithm recognizes an object's exact identity (e.g. Bob's BMW). Two special challenges characterize OID. (1) Interclass variation is often small (many cars look alike) and may be dwarfed by illumination or pose changes. (2) There may be many classes but few or just one positive "training" examples per class. Due to (1), a solution must locate possibly subtle object-specific salient features (a door handle) while avoiding distracting ones (a specular highlight). However, (2) rules out direct techniques of feature selection. We describe an online algorithm that takes one model image from a known category and builds an efficient "same" vs. "different" classification cascade by predicting the most discriminative feature set for that object. Our method not only estimates the saliency and scoring function for each candidate feature, but also models the dependency between features, building an ordered feature sequence unique to a specific model image, maximizing cumulative information content. Learned stopping thresholds make the classifier very efficient. To make this possible, category-specific characteristics are learned automatically in an off-line training procedure from labeled image pairs of the category, without prior knowledge about the category. Our method, using the same algorithm for both cars and faces, outperforms a wide variety of other methods.