Pet faces can be detected within an image using a cascaded adaboost classifier trained to identify pet faces with a high detection rate and a high false positive rate. The identified potential windows are further processed by a number of category aware cascade classifiers, which are each trained to identify pet faces of a particular category with a high detection rate and low false positive rate. The potential pet faces identified by the category aware classifiers may be processed to verify whether a pet's face is present or not.