Learning an object class representation on a continuous viewsphere

We propose an approach to multi-view object class detection and approximate 3D pose estimation. It relies on CAD models as positive training examples and discriminatively learns photometric object parts such that an optimal coverage of intra-class and viewpoint variation is guaranteed. In contrast to previous work, the approach shows a significantly reduced training set dependency while avoiding any manual training supervision or annotation, since it is capable of deriving all relevant information exclusively from the provided set of 3D CAD models and an arbitrary set of 2D negative images. In entirely circumventing semantic or view-based representations, part symmetries and co-occurrences between viewpoints can be efficiently exploited. This, in turn, leads to a significantly lower complexity while still achieving state-of-the-art performance on two current benchmark data sets for two different object classes.