Taylor expansion based classifier adaptation: Application to person detection

Because of the large variation across different environments, a generic classifier trained on extensive data-sets may perform sub-optimally in a particular test environment. In this paper, we present a general framework for classifier adaptation, which improves an existing generic classifier in the new test environment. Viewing classifier learning as a cost minimization problem, we perform classifier adaptation by combining the cost function on the old data-sets with the cost function on the data-set collected from the new environment. The former term is further approximated with its second order Taylor expansion to reduce the amount of information that needs to be saved for adaptation. Unlike traditional approaches that are often designed for a specific application or classifier, our scheme is applicable to various types of classifiers and user labels. We demonstrate this property on two popular classifiers (logistic regression and boosting), while using two types of user labels (direct labels and similarity labels). Extensive experiments conducted for the task of person detection in conference-room environments show that significant performance improvement can be achieved with our proposed method.