We introduce an Expanded Parts Model (EPM) for recognizing human attributes (e.g., young, short hair, wearing suits) and actions (e.g., running, jumping) in still images. An EPM is a collection of part templates which are learnt discriminatively to explain specific scale-space regions in the images (in human centric coordinates). This is in contrast to current models which consist of a relatively few (i.e., a mixture of) ‘average’ templates. EPM uses only a subset of the parts to score an image and scores the image sparsely in space, i.e., it ignores redundant and random background in an image. To learn our model, we propose an algorithm which automatically mines parts and learns corresponding discriminative templates together with their respective locations from a large number of candidate parts. We validate our method on three recent challenging datasets of human attributes and actions. We obtain convincing qualitative and state-of-the-art quantitative results on the three datasets.
In mixture of components models, the training images are usually assigned to a single component (see Fig. for an illustration) and thus contribute to training one of the templates only. Such clustering like property limits their capability to generate novel articulations, as sub-articulation in different components cannot be combined. Such clustering and averaging are a form of regularization and involve manually setting the number of parts and components. In comparison, the proposed EPM does not enforce similar averaging, nor does it forbid it by definition. It can have a large number of parts (up to the order of the number of training images) if found necessary despite sufficient regularization. Part-based deformable models initialize the parts either with heuristics ( regions with high average energy @cite_84 ) or use annotations @cite_75 , while EPM systematically explores parts at a large number of locations, scales and atomicities and selects the ones best suited for the task.
@cite_75 @cite_84
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The deformable part-based model (DPM) proposed by has demonstrated state-of-the-art results in object localization. The model offers a high degree of learnt invariance by utilizing viewpoint-dependent mixture components and movable parts in each mixture component. One might hope to increase the accuracy of the DPM by increasing the number of mixture components and parts to give a more faithful model, but limited training data prevents this from being effective. We propose an extension to the DPM which allows for sharing of object part models among multiple mixture components as well as object classes. This results in more compact models and allows training examples to be shared by multiple components, ameliorating the effect of a limited size training set. We (i) reformulate the DPM to incorporate part sharing, and (ii) propose a novel energy function allowing for coupled training of mixture components and object classes. We report state-of-the-art results on the PASCAL VOC dataset. We describe a method for articulated human detection and human pose estimation in static images based on a new representation of deformable part models. Rather than modeling articulation using a family of warped (rotated and foreshortened) templates, we use a mixture of small, nonoriented parts. We describe a general, flexible mixture model that jointly captures spatial relations between part locations and co-occurrence relations between part mixtures, augmenting standard pictorial structure models that encode just spatial relations. Our models have several notable properties: 1) They efficiently model articulation by sharing computation across similar warps, 2) they efficiently model an exponentially large set of global mixtures through composition of local mixtures, and 3) they capture the dependency of global geometry on local appearance (parts look different at different locations). When relations are tree structured, our models can be efficiently optimized with dynamic programming. We learn all parameters, including local appearances, spatial relations, and co-occurrence relations (which encode local rigidity) with a structured SVM solver. Because our model is efficient enough to be used as a detector that searches over scales and image locations, we introduce novel criteria for evaluating pose estimation and human detection, both separately and jointly. We show that currently used evaluation criteria may conflate these two issues. Most previous approaches model limbs with rigid and articulated templates that are trained independently of each other, while we present an extensive diagnostic evaluation that suggests that flexible structure and joint training are crucial for strong performance. We present experimental results on standard benchmarks that suggest our approach is the state-of-the-art system for pose estimation, improving past work on the challenging Parse and Buffy datasets while being orders of magnitude faster. The main stated contribution of the Deformable Parts Model (DPM) detector of (over the Histogram-of-Oriented-Gradients approach of Dalal and Triggs) is the use of deformable parts. A secondary contribution is the latent discriminative learning. Tertiary is the use of multiple components. A common belief in the vision community (including ours, before this study) is that their ordering of contributions reflects the performance of detector in practice. However, what we have experimentally found is that the ordering of importance might actually be the reverse. First, we show that by increasing the number of components, and switching the initialization step from their aspect-ratio, left-right flipping heuristics to appearance-based clustering, considerable improvement in performance is obtained. But more intriguingly, we show that with these new components, the part deformations can now be completely switched off, yet obtaining results that are almost on par with the original DPM detector. Finally, we also show initial results for using multiple components on a different problem -- scene classification, suggesting that this idea might have wider applications in addition to object detection. We propose a clustering method that considers non-rigid alignment of samples. The motivation for such a clustering is training of object detectors that consist of multiple mixture components. In particular, we consider the deformable part model (DPM) of , where each mixture component includes a learned deformation model. We show that alignment based clustering distributes the data better to the mixture components of the DPM than previous methods. Moreover, the alignment helps the non-convex optimization of the DPM find a consistent placement of its parts and, thus, learn more accurate part filters.