Structural sparse representation for object detection

Classic sparse representation, as one of prevalent feature learning methods, is successfully applied for different computer vision tasks. However it has some intrinsic defects in object detection. Firstly, how to learn a discriminative dictionary for object detection is a hard problem. Secondly, it is usually very time-consuming to learn dictionary based features in a traditional exhaustive search manner like sliding window. In this paper, we propose a novel feature learning framework for object detection with the structure sparsity constraint and classification error minimization constraint to learn a discriminative dictionary. For improving the efficiency, we just learn sparse representation coefficients from object candidate regions and feed them to a kernelized SVM classifier. Experiments on INRIA Person Dataset and Pascal VOC 2007 challenge dataset clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared with two state-of-the-art baselines.