  The ability to efficiently and accurately detect objects plays a very crucial
role for many computer vision tasks. Recently, offline object detectors have
shown a tremendous success. However, one major drawback of offline techniques
is that a complete set of training data has to be collected beforehand. In
addition, once learned, an offline detector can not make use of newly arriving
data. To alleviate these drawbacks, online learning has been adopted with the
following objectives: (1) the technique should be computationally and storage
efficient; (2) the updated classifier must maintain its high classification
accuracy. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient framework for
learning an adaptive online greedy sparse linear discriminant analysis (GSLDA)
model. Unlike many existing online boosting detectors, which usually apply
exponential or logistic loss, our online algorithm makes use of LDA's learning
criterion that not only aims to maximize the class-separation criterion but
also incorporates the asymmetrical property of training data distributions. We
provide a better alternative for online boosting algorithms in the context of
training a visual object detector. We demonstrate the robustness and efficiency
of our methods on handwriting digit and face data sets. Our results confirm
that object detection tasks benefit significantly when trained in an online
manner.
