Hamiltonian Streamline Guided Feature Extraction with Applications to Face Detection

We propose a new feature extraction method based on two dynamical systems induced by intensity landscape: the negative gradient system and the Hamiltonian system. We build features based on the Hamiltonian streamlines. These features contain nice global topological information about the intensity landscape, and can be used for object detection. We show that for training images of same size, our feature space is much smaller than that generated by Haar-like features. The training time is extremely short, and detection speed and accuracy is similar to Haar-like feature based classifiers.