TransientBoost: On-line boosting with transient data

For on-line learning algorithms, which are applied in many vision tasks such as detection or tracking, robust integration of unlabeled samples is a crucial point. Various strategies such as self-training, semi-supervised learning and multiple-instance learning have been proposed. However, these methods are either too adaptive, which causes drifting, or biased by a prior, which hinders incorporation of new (orthogonal) information. Therefore, we propose a new on-line learning algorithm (TransientBoost), which is highly adaptive but still robust. This is realized by using an internal multi-class representation and modeling reliable and unreliable data in separate classes. Unreliable data is considered transient, hence we use highly adaptive learning parameters to adapt to fast changes in the scene while errors fade out fast. In contrast, the reliable data is preserved completely and not harmed by wrong updates. We demonstrate our algorithm on two different tasks, i.e., object detection and object tracking showing that we can handle typical problems considerable better than existing approaches. To demonstrate the stability and the robustness, we show long-term experiments for both tasks.