Fast Object Detection with Entropy-Driven Evaluation

Cascade-style approaches to implementing ensemble classifiers can deliver significant speed-ups at test time. While highly effective, they remain challenging to tune and their overall performance depends on the availability of large validation sets to estimate rejection thresholds. These characteristics are often prohibitive and thus limit their applicability. We introduce an alternative approach to speeding-up classifier evaluation which overcomes these limitations. It involves maintaining a probability estimate of the class label at each intermediary response and stopping when the corresponding uncertainty becomes small enough. As a result, the evaluation terminates early based on the sequence of responses observed. Furthermore, it does so independently of the type of ensemble classifier used or the way it was trained. We show through extensive experimentation that our method provides 2 to 10 fold speed-ups, over existing state-of-the-art methods, at almost no loss in accuracy on a number of object classification tasks.