Granularity-tunable gradients partition (GGP) descriptors for human detection

This paper proposes a novel descriptor, granularity-tunable gradients partition (GGP), for human detection. The concept granularity is used to define the spatial and angular uncertainty of the line segments in the Hough space. Then this uncertainty is backprojected into the image space by orientation-space partitioning to achieve efficient implementation. By changing the granularity parameter, the level of uncertainty can be controlled quantitatively. Therefore a family of descriptors with versatile representation property can be generated. Specifically, the finely granular GGP descriptors can represent the specific geometry information of the object (the same as Edgelet); while the coarsely granular GGP descriptors can provide the statistical representation of the object (the same as histograms of oriented gradients, HOG). Moreover, the position, orientation, strength and distribution of the gradients are embedded into a unified descriptor to further improve the GGP's representation power. A cascade structured classifier is built by boosting the linear regression functions. Experimental results on INRIA dataset show that the proposed method achieves comparable results to those of the state-of-the-art methods.