Popular Hough Transform-based object detection approaches usually construct an appearance codebook by clustering local image features. However, how to choose appropriate values for the parameters used in the clustering step remains an open problem. Moreover, some popular histogram features extracted from overlapping image blocks may cause a high degree of redundancy and multicollinearity. In this paper, we propose a novel Hough Transform-based object detection approach. First, to address the above issues, we exploit a Bridge Partial Least Squares (BPLS) technique to establish context-encoded Hough Regression Models (HRMs), which are linear regression models that cast probabilistic Hough votes to predict object locations. BPLS is an efficient variant of Partial Least Squares (PLS). PLS-based regression techniques (including BPLS) can reduce the redundancy and eliminate the multicollinearity of a feature set. And the appropriate value of the only parameter used in PLS (i.e., the number of latent components) can be determined by using a cross-validation procedure. Second, to efficiently handle object scale changes, we propose a novel multi-scale voting scheme. In this scheme, multiple Hough images corresponding to multiple object scales can be obtained simultaneously. Third, an object in a test image may correspond to multiple true and false positive hypotheses at different scales. Based on the proposed multi-scale voting scheme, a principled strategy is proposed to fuse hypotheses to reduce false positives by evaluating normalized pointwise mutual information between hypotheses. In the experiments, we also compare the proposed HRM approach with its several variants to evaluate the influences of its components on its performance. Experimental results show that the proposed HRM approach has achieved desirable performances on popular benchmark datasets.
However, the clustering step for building up a codebook in ISM and partISM is time-consuming. Moreover, in the clustering step, a distance threshold is used to determine whether a local feature should merge with a cluster. The threshold value can significantly influence the effectiveness of the derived codebook. In addition, the weights assigned to all Hough votes cast from a codebook entry are identical in the ISM approach. To address these issues, a number of improvements have been made to the ISM approach in recent years. Instead of unsupervised clustering, the Hough forests @cite_22 @cite_31 and DGHT @cite_0 approaches implement a supervised clustering step to construct random forests. The leaf nodes of a tree in a random forest are considered to form a discriminative codebook. Given a local feature in a test image, both its corresponding voting vectors and the probability that the feature belongs to foreground can be obtained from the leaf nodes of a tree. The probability is considered as the weight of any Hough vote cast by the feature. The MMHT @cite_11 approach adapts the probabilistic framework in the ISM approach and learns the weights of Hough votes in a discriminative max-margin framework.
@cite_0 @cite_31 @cite_22 @cite_11
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We present a method for the detection of instances of an object class, such as cars or pedestrians, in natural images. Similarly to some previous works, this is accomplished via generalized Hough transform, where the detections of individual object parts cast probabilistic votes for possible locations of the centroid of the whole object; the detection hypotheses then correspond to the maxima of the Hough image that accumulates the votes from all parts. However, whereas the previous methods detect object parts using generative codebooks of part appearances, we take a more discriminative approach to object part detection. Towards this end, we train a class-specific Hough forest, which is a random forest that directly maps the image patch appearance to the probabilistic vote about the possible location of the object centroid. We demonstrate that Hough forests improve the results of the Hough-transform object detection significantly and achieve state-of-the-art performance for several classes and datasets. The paper introduces Hough forests, which are random forests adapted to perform a generalized Hough transform in an efficient way. Compared to previous Hough-based systems such as implicit shape models, Hough forests improve the performance of the generalized Hough transform for object detection on a categorical level. At the same time, their flexibility permits extensions of the Hough transform to new domains such as object tracking and action recognition. Hough forests can be regarded as task-adapted codebooks of local appearance that allow fast supervised training and fast matching at test time. They achieve high detection accuracy since the entries of such codebooks are optimized to cast Hough votes with small variance and since their efficiency permits dense sampling of local image patches or video cuboids during detection. The efficacy of Hough forests for a set of computer vision tasks is validated through experiments on a large set of publicly available benchmark data sets and comparisons with the state-of-the-art. We present a discriminative Hough transform based object detector where each local part casts a weighted vote for the possible locations of the object center. We show that the weights can be learned in a max-margin framework which directly optimizes the classification performance. The discriminative training takes into account both the codebook appearance and the spatial distribution of its position with respect to the object center to derive its importance. On various datasets we show that the discriminative training improves the Hough detector. Combined with a verification step using a SVM based classifier, our approach achieves a detection rate of 91.9 at 0.3 false positives per image on the ETHZ shape dataset, a significant improvement over the state of the art, while running the verification step on at least an order of magnitude fewer windows than in a sliding window approach. We present a method to classify and localize human actions in video using a Hough transform voting framework. Random trees are trained to learn a mapping between densely-sampled feature patches and their corresponding votes in a spatio-temporal-action Hough space. The leaves of the trees form a discriminative multi-class codebook that share features between the action classes and vote for action centers in a probabilistic manner. Using low-level features such as gradients and optical flow, we demonstrate that Hough-voting can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several datasets covering a wide range of action-recognition scenarios.