Training Deformable Object Models for Human Detection based on Alignment and Clustering

Abstract: 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 Felzenszwalb et al., 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.