METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR TRAINING A NEURAL NETWORK TO LEARN HIERARCHICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF OBJECTS AND TO DETECT AND CLASSIFY OBJECTS WITH UNCERTAIN TRAINING DATA

A signal processing apparatus and concomitant method for learning and integrating features from multiple resolutions for detecting and/or classifying objects are presented. Neural networks in a pattern tree structure with tree-structured descriptions of objects in terms of simple sub-patterns, are grown and trained to detect and integrate the sub-patterns. A plurality of objective functions and their approximations are presented to train the neural networks to detect sub-patterns of features of some class of objects. Objective functions for training neural networks to detect objects whose positions in the training data are uncertain and for addressing supervised learning where there are potential errors in the training data are also presented.