1. A method for detecting an object of interest in an input image, comprising the computer-implemented steps of: a multi-class pose classifier estimating a pose of an object of interest within an input image based on a plurality of pose features; selecting at least one of a plurality of cascades of serially-linked binary object feature classifiers, wherein each cascade represents a different pose, and the poses represented by the selected ones are similar to the estimate pose, each binary object feature classifier identifies at least one object feature associated with the object of interest, and classifiers in sequence in each cascade have respectively increasing accuracy in identifying the object features; and employing the selected cascades to detect an instance of the object of interest in the image.