Information processing apparatus and method, recording medium, and program

In an information processing apparatus, such as a robot that discriminates human faces, nodes are hierarchically arranged in a tree structure. Each of the nodes has a number of weak classifiers. Each terminal node learns face images associated with one label. An upper node learns learning samples of all labels learned by lower nodes. When a window image to be classified is input, discrimination is performed sequentially from upper nodes to lower nodes. When it is determined that the window image does not correspond to a human face, discrimination by lower nodes is not performed, and discrimination proceeds to sibling nodes.