HAAR xml file

Because many people have asked for it, I believe that it will make your life easier I give you my trained hand HAAR cascade xml file.
It's trained on about 20k positives and 20k negatives and works on any orientation.
Watch for high false positive rates. It also works with the cuda version of OpenCV.

It will help you but it won't make you happy.

The xml download. In a later post I will show you how to make haar cascade perform even better.

Using train cascades

The detector I trained back in November doesn't work for me anymore, so I'm attempting to train another one using the train cascades executable provided in the OpenCV framework.

I gathered 70k negatives , 30k positives and I run exactly the same code and boom crash burn. All I got was the message "Train dataset for temp stage can not be filled. Branch training terminated."

After 2 hours of screwing around all possible combinations and reading the same problems on the net I decided to look at the code (damn messy C++ code). After that I decided to reduce the number of negatives to the same number of positives and voila it worked.

I've come to believe that OpenCV was originally written by a couple of uber programmers and then left to be wrecked by drunken monkeys.