Polyhedral Conic Classifiers for Computer Vision Applications and Open Set Recognition.

This paper introduces a family of quasi-linear discriminants that outperform current large-margin methods in sliding window visual object detection and open set recognition tasks. In these applications, the classification problems are both numerically imbalanced - positive (object class) training and test windows are much rarer than negative (non-class) ones - and geometrically asymmetric - the positive samples typically form compact, visually-coherent groups while negatives are much more diverse, including anything at all that is not a well-centered sample from the target class. For such tasks, there is a need for discriminants whose decision regions focus on tightly circumscribing the positive class, while still taking account of negatives in zones where the two classes overlap.