A multi-view probabilistic model for 3D object classes

We propose a novel probabilistic framework for learning visual models of 3D object categories by combining appearance information and geometric constraints. Objects are represented as a coherent ensemble of parts that are consistent under 3D viewpoint transformations. Each part is a collection of salient image features. A generative framework is used for learning a model that captures the relative position of parts within each of the discretized viewpoints. Contrary to most of the existing mixture of viewpoints models, our model establishes explicit correspondences of parts across different viewpoints of the object class. Given a new image, detection and classification are achieved by determining the position and viewpoint of the model that maximize recognition scores of the candidate objects. Our approach is among the first to propose a generative probabilistic framework for 3D object categorization. We test our algorithm on the detection task and the viewpoint classification task by using “car” category from both the Savarese et al. 2007 and PASCAL VOC 2006 datasets. We show promising results in both the detection and viewpoint classification tasks on these two challenging datasets.