cascade classifier - very few haar cascades are working?

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Hi everyone,

I have spent the past 3 or so hours trying to figure out what is wrong with my introductory attempts at getting haar cascades to detect facial features. I am just beginning to explore this topic so I am essentially just running the example code found here

http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/objdetect/cascade_classifier/cascade_classifier.html#cascade-classifier

The problem is it doesn't detect my face or eyes! I have tried a few different cascades and the only one that detected anything was the lbpcascade_frontalface. Other than that I am getting zero results. Are these haar cascades highly unreliable or am I (more likely) doing something wrong in my code? My code is exactly what is found in the example.

Would love any thoughts people have and/or pointing me in the direction of basic examples of haar cascades would be helpful - it's very hard to find anything beyond the example I posted above.

The .xml files are in the correct place (as I mentioned I AM getting results for one lbpcascade) so I don't believe that is the problem.

Thanks!

UPDATE: Something worth noting is that when I use any of the haarcascades the data after the cascade is loaded is all null pointers except for a category "Old style cascade" which does have data. could this be the source of my problem? When I use the lbpcascade the data that is loaded does not have null pointers.