Patent ID: 7715591

Claim:
A computer implemented method of object detection comprising an act of causing a processor to perform operations of: receiving images of an area occupied by at least one object; extracting image features including wavelet features from the images; classifying the image features to produce object class confidence data, wherein the classifying operation is performed by at least two sub-classifiers; and performing data fusion on the object class confidence data to produce a detected object estimate, wherein the operation of performing data fusion comprises the operations of: initially training the sub-classifiers in a supervised way by using the image features as inputs to the sub-classifiers and by using correct decisions known a priori as outputs of the sub-classifiers; training a fusion classifier by using confidence values generated by the trained sub-classifiers as inputs to the fusion classifier and by using correct decisions known a priori as outputs of the fusion classifier; and using the trained sub-classifiers and trained fusion classifier to perform data fusion to produce a detected object estimate when the correct decisions are unknown; wherein the operation of classifying image features comprises processing the image features with at least one classification algorithm; and wherein at least one of the classification algorithms is selected from the group consisting of a trained C5 decision tree, a trained Nonlinear Discriminant Analysis network, and a trained Fuzzy Aggregation Network.