In 2008/2011 I have actively worked on object detection in images, defining a generic method to speed up detection and improve its accuracy. The method is based on an iterative Monte Carlo Sampling, and it has been recently published on IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intellingence

G. Gualdi, A. Prati, R. Cucchiara, “Multi-Stage Particle Windows for Fast and Accurate Object Detection” (to be published soon) IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2012

A few sample images and a video of pedestrian and face detection: