Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have been proven to be effective for various computer vision problems. In this work, we demonstrate its effectiveness on a continuous object orientation estimation task, which requires prediction of 0 to 360 degrees orientation of the objects. We do so by proposing and comparing three continuous orientation prediction approaches designed for the DCNNs. The first two approaches work by representing an orientation as a point on a unit circle and minimizing either L2 loss or angular difference loss. The third method works by first converting the continuous orientation estimation task into a set of discrete orientation estimation tasks and then converting the discrete orientation outputs back to the continuous orientation using a mean-shift algorithm. By evaluating on a vehicle orientation estimation task and a pedestrian orientation estimation task, we demonstrate that the discretization-based approach not only works better than the other two approaches but also achieves state-of-the-art performance. We also demonstrate that finding an appropriate feature representation is critical to achieve a good performance when adapting a DCNN trained for an image recognition task.
Regression-based models built on local gradient-based feature descriptors have showed to be successful for continuous pose estimation of object categories. Nonetheless, a crucial weakness of these methods is that no geometric information is taken into account. Therefore, geometrically inconsistent poses may be preferred, and this forces to employ a coarse-grained pose estimator as a pre-processing step to avoid potentially large estimation errors. In this paper, we propose a method that combines generative feature models and graph matching techniques in a unified probabilistic formulation of the continuous pose estimation problem. Our approach retains the lightness and generality of generative feature modeling, while favoring geometrically consistent results. Experiments show that pose pre-processing steps are not needed if geometry is embedded in the matching stage. We evaluated our approach on two different car datasets and we experimentally show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 25 . In this paper we propose a framework for learning a regression function form a set of local features in an image. The regression is learned from an embedded representation that reflects the local features and their spatial arrangement as well as enforces supervised manifold constraints on the data. We applied the approach for viewpoint estimation on a Multiview car dataset, a head pose dataset and arm posture dataset. The experimental results show that this approach has superior results (up to 67 improvement) to the state-of-the-art approaches in very challenging datasets. In this paper, we treat the problem of continuous pose estimation for object categories as a regression problem on the basis of only 2D training information. While regression is a natural framework for continuous problems, regression methods so far achieved inferior results with respect to 3D-based and 2D-based classification-and-refinement approaches. This may be attributed to their weakness to high intra-class variability as well as to noisy matching procedures and lack of geometrical constraints. We propose to apply regression to Fisher-encoded vectors computed from large cells by learning an array of Fisher regressors. Fisher encoding makes our algorithm flexible to variations in class appearance, while the array structure permits to indirectly introduce spatial context information in the approach. We formulate our problem as a MAP inference problem, where the likelihood function is composed of a generative term based on the prediction error generated by the ensemble of Fisher regressors as well as a discriminative term based on SVM classifiers. We test our algorithm on three publicly available datasets that envisage several difficulties, such as high intra-class variability, truncations, occlusions, and motion blur, obtaining state-of-the-art results. In this paper, we propose a method for learning a class representation that can return a continuous value for the pose of an unknown class instance using only 2D data and weak 3D labeling information. Our method is based on generative feature models, i.e., regression functions learned from local descriptors of the same patch collected under different viewpoints. The individual generative models are then clustered in order to create class generative models which form the class representation. At run-time, the pose of the query image is estimated in a maximum a posteriori fashion by combining the regression functions belonging to the matching clusters. We evaluate our approach on the EPFL car dataset and the Pointing'04 face dataset. Experimental results show that our method outperforms by 10 the state-of-the-art in the first dataset and by 9 in the second.