Abstract: We present a method that can dramatically accelerate object detection with part based models. The method is based on the observation that the cost of detection is likely to be dominated by the cost of matching each part to the image, and not by the cost of computing the optimal configuration of the parts as commonly assumed. Therefore accelerating detection requires minimizing the number of
part-to-image comparisons. To this end we propose a multiple-resolutions hierarchical part based model and a corresponding coarse-to-fine inference procedure that recursively eliminates from the search space unpromising part
placements. The method yields a ten-fold speedup over the standard dynamic programming approach and is complementary to the cascade-of-parts approach of [9]. Compared to the latter, our method does not have parameters to be determined empirically, which simplifies its use during the training of the model. Most importantly, the two techniques can be combined to obtain a very significant speedup, of two orders of magnitude in some cases. We evaluate our method extensively on the PASCAL VOC and INRIA datasets, demonstrating a very high increase in the detection speed with little degradation of the accuracy.

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of human action recognition in reconstructed 3-D data acquired by multi-camera systems. We contribute to this field by introducing a novel 3-D action recognition approach based on detection of 4-D (3-D space $+$ time) spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) and local description of 3-D motion features. STIPs are detected in multi-view images and extended to 4-D using 3-D reconstructions of the actors and pixel-to-vertex correspondences of the multi-camera setup. Local 3-D motion descriptors, histogram of optical 3-D flow (HOF3D), are extracted from estimated 3-D optical flow in the neighborhood of each 4-D STIP and made view-invariant. The local HOF3D descriptors are divided using 3-D spatial pyramids to capture and improve the discrimination between arm- and leg-based actions. Based on these pyramids of HOF3D descriptors we build a bag-of-words (BoW) vocabulary of human actions, which is compressed and classified using agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB) and support vector machines (SVMs), respectively. Experiments on the publicly available i3DPost and IXMAS datasets show promising state-of-the-art results and validate the performance and view-invariance of the approach.