The presence of occluders significantly impacts object recognition accuracy. However, occlusion is typically treated as an unstructured source of noise and explicit models for occluders have lagged behind those for object appearance and shape. In this paper we describe a hierarchical deformable part model for face detection and landmark localization that explicitly models part occlusion. The proposed model structure makes it possible to augment positive training data with large numbers of synthetically occluded instances. This allows us to easily incorporate the statistics of occlusion patterns in a discriminatively trained model. We test the model on several benchmarks for landmark localization and detection including challenging new data sets featuring significant occlusion. We find that the addition of an explicit occlusion model yields a detection system that outperforms existing approaches for occluded instances while maintaining competitive accuracy in detection and landmark localization for unoccluded instances.
Modeling occlusion is a natural fit for recognition systems with an explicit representation of parts. Work on generative constellation models @cite_8 @cite_27 learned parameters of a full joint distribution over the probability of part occlusion and relied on brute force enumeration for inference, a strategy that doesn't scale to large numbers of landmarks. More commonly, part occlusions are treated independently which makes computation and representation more efficient. For example, the supervised detection model of @cite_17 associates with each part a binary variable indicating occlusion and learns a corresponding appearance template for the occluded state.
@cite_27 @cite_17 @cite_8
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We present a method to learn and recognize object class models from unlabeled and unsegmented cluttered scenes in a scale invariant manner. Objects are modeled as flexible constellations of parts. A probabilistic representation is used for all aspects of the object: shape, appearance, occlusion and relative scale. An entropy-based feature detector is used to select regions and their scale within the image. In learning the parameters of the scale-invariant object model are estimated. This is done using expectation-maximization in a maximum-likelihood setting. In recognition, this model is used in a Bayesian manner to classify images. The flexible nature of the model is demonstrated by excellent results over a range of datasets including geometrically constrained classes (e.g. faces, cars) and flexible objects (such as animals). Deformable part-based models [1, 2] achieve state-of-the-art performance for object detection, but rely on heuristic initialization during training due to the optimization of non-convex cost function. This paper investigates limitations of such an initialization and extends earlier methods using additional supervision. We explore strong supervision in terms of annotated object parts and use it to (i) improve model initialization, (ii) optimize model structure, and (iii) handle partial occlusions. Our method is able to deal with sub-optimal and incomplete annotations of object parts and is shown to benefit from semi-supervised learning setups where part-level annotation is provided for a fraction of positive examples only. Experimental results are reported for the detection of six animal classes in PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2010 datasets. We demonstrate significant improvements in detection performance compared to the LSVM [1] and the Poselet [3] object detectors. We propose a method to learn heterogeneous models of object classes for visual recognition. The training images contain a preponderance of clutter and learning is unsupervised. Our models represent objects as probabilistic constellations of rigid parts (features). The variability within a class is represented by a join probability density function on the shape of the constellation and the appearance of the parts. Our method automatically identifies distinctive features in the training set. The set of model parameters is then learned using expectation maximization. When trained on different, unlabeled and unsegmented views of a class of objects, each component of the mixture model can adapt to represent a subset of the views. Similarly, different component models can also "specialize" on sub-classes of an object class. Experiments on images of human heads, leaves from different species of trees, and motor-cars demonstrate that the method works well over a wide variety of objects.