I am trying to train a haar-like classifier for pedestrians in OpenCV using 3340 positive images and 1224 negative images. (in a .txt file I keep the negative image names i.
this issue was answered by creater of the utility on the OpenCV DevZone site in June 2012.
To quote Maria:
The problem is that your vec-file has exactly the same samples count that you passed in command line -numPos 979. Training application used all samples from the vec-file to train 0-stage and it can not get new positive samples for the next stage training because vec-file is over. The bug of traincascade is that it had assert() in such cases, but it has to throw an exception with error message for a user. It was fixed in r8913. -numPose is a samples count that is used to train each stage. Some already used samples can be filtered by each previous stage (ie recognized as background), but no more than (1 - minHitRate) * numPose on each stage. So vec-file has to contain >= (numPose + (numStages-1) * (1 - minHitRate) * numPose) + S, where S is a count of samples from vec-file that can be recognized as background right away. I hope it can help you to create vec-file of correct size and chose right numPos value.
It worked for me. I also had same problem, I was following the famous tutorial on HAAR training but wanted to try the newer training utility with -npos 7000 -nneg 2973
so i did following calcs:
vec-file has to contain >= (numPos + (numStages-1) * (1 - minHitRate) * numPos) + S
7000 >= (numPos + (20-1) * (1 - 0.999) * numPos) + 2973
(7000 - 2973)/(1 + 19*0.001) >= numPos
numPos <= 4027/1.019
numPos <= 3951 ~~ 3950
and used:
-npos 3950 -nneg 2973
It works. I also noticed that others have also had success with reducing numPos : here