Efficient Unsupervised Learning for Localization and Detection in Object Categories

We describe a novel method for learning templates for recognition and localization of objects drawn from categories. A generative model represents the configuration of multiple object parts with respect to an object coordinate system; these parts in turn generate image features. The complexity of the model in the number of features is low, meaning our model is much more efficient to train than comparative methods. Moreover, a variational approximation is introduced that allows learning to be orders of magnitude faster than previous approaches while incorporating many more features. This results in both accuracy and localization improvements. Our model has been carefully tested on standard datasets; we compare with a number of recent template models. In particular, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results for detection and localization.