Unsupervised learning of boosted tree classifier using graph cuts for hand pose recognition

This study proposes an unsupervised learning approach for the task of hand pose recognition. Considering the large variation in hand poses, classification using a decision tree seems highly suitable for this purpose. Various research works have used boosted decision trees and have shown encouraging results for pose recognition. This work also employs a boosted classifier tree learned in an unsupervised manner for hand pose recognition. We use a recursive two way spectral clustering method, namely the Normalized Cut method (NCut), to generate the decision tree. A binary boosting classifier is then learned at each node of the tree generated by the clustering algorithm. Since the output of the clustering algorithm may contain outliers in practice, the variant of boosting algorithm applied at each node is the Soft Margin version of AdaBoost, which was developed to maximize the classifier margin in a noisy environment. We propose a novel approach to learn the weak classifiers of the boosting process using the partitioning vector given by the NCut algorithm. The algorithm applies a linear regression of feature responses with the partitioning vector and utilizes the sample weights used in boosting to learn the weak hypotheses. Initial result shows satisfactory performances in recognizing complex hand poses with large variations in background and illumination. This framework of tree classifier can also be applied to general multi-class object recognition.