Learning a Sparse Representation for Object Detection

We present an approach for learning to detect objects in still gray images, that is based on a sparse, part-based representation of objects. A vocabulary of information-rich object parts is automatically constructed from a set of sample images of the object class of interest. Images are then represented using parts from this vocabulary, along with spatial relations observed among them. Based on this representation, a feature-efficient learning algorithm is used to learn to detect instances of the object class. The framework developed can be applied to any object with distinguishable parts in a relatively fixed spatial configuration. We report experiments on images of side views of cars. Our experiments show that the method achieves high detection accuracy on a difficult test set of real-world images, and is highly robust to partial occlusion and background variation.In addition, we discuss and offer solutions to several methodological issues that are significant for the research community to be able to evaluate object detection approaches.