An incremental learning method for face recognition under continuous video stream

The current technology in computer vision requires humans to collect images, store images, segment images for computers and train computer recognition systems using these images. It is unlikely that such a manual labor process can meet the demands of many challenging recognition tasks. Our goal is to enable machines to learn directly from sensory input streams while interacting with the environment including human teachers. We propose a new technique which incrementally derives discriminating features in the input space. Virtual labels are formed by clustering in the output space to extract discriminating features in the input space. We organize the resulting discriminating subspace in a coarse-to-fine fashion and store the information in a decision tree. Such an incremental hierarchical discriminating regression (IHDR) decision tree can be modeled by a hierarchical probability distribution model. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm on the problem of face recognition using video sequences of 33889 frames in length from 143 different subjects. A correct recognition rate of 95.1% has been achieved.